Mansfield’s refined focus has led to a number of job cuts, The New York Times reports, and it illustrates the difficulties of initially trying to develop an electric vehicle and autonomous software simultaneously.
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Apple Inc. has shut down some elements of its effort to build an electric self-driving vehicle and laid off several dozen employees, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Apple is rethinking what it plans to do about self-driving cars, just as other big tech companies appear ready to plow ahead with competing efforts. The report also says several vehicles are now being tested, presumably one of which is in rose gold.
Another competitor, Uber has started tests in limited areas that involve picking up its customers with self-driving cars.
Even the traditional auto companies have realised we’re all going to be transported by autonomous machines in the not-too-distant future, and pretty much all of them are now looking at getting their own self-driving tech sorted. We’ll have to wait and see whether Apple’s reboot is enough to help it catch up. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
Electric cars rely not on the internal combustion engine, but on technologies more prevalent in the consumer electronics world: batteries, sensors and software. He was asked to continue the project after the former project manager Steven Zadesky left the corporation at the beginning of the year. The company has also not publicly acknowledged that it is working on Apple Car. In the process, he has also brought under control the mounting issues of the division ballooning to over 1,000 employees in the past eighteen months. Nabbe reportedly worked on computer vision, navigation and AI on Apple’s Titan team.
Apple employees were told that the layoffs were part of a “reboot” of the vehicle project, the people briefed on it said.
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Apple has also made some headway in the space. Like other companies in the space, that technology is likely a number of years away from seeing mainstream consumer use, they added.
