According to Reuters, Mission Motors ceased operations back in May after losing its top talent to Apple. In the months after, more employees left to Apple.
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From its founding in 2007, Mission attracted engineers driven to build a world-class electric motorcycle. “Mission had a great group of engineers, specifically electric drive expertise”. Reports have suggested that Apple is aggressively poaching employees from companies that specialize in electric transportation, Tesla is one of them though the company’s CEO recently said that people who didn’t make it at Tesla went to work at Apple instead, now a small electric motorcycle manufacturer is complaining that Apple’s poaching of its employees has left it “in the dust”.
Former CEO of Mission Motors, Derek Kaufman, said that had the firm not lost its key employees, it would have carried on to raise funding. The firm was trying to raise a crucial round of funding last autumn, and around the same Apple Inc.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a similar situation, A123 Systems sued Apple for poaching its top engineers and forcing it to abandon key projects.
That was illustrated earlier this yr when experience-hailing app Uber snatched as many as 50 individuals away from Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics lab, in accordance to media stories, to assist it construct a self-driving vehicle.
Apple by no means tried to purchase Mission Motors, Kaufman stated.
At least two Mission staff joined Apple in 2012, in accordance to LinkedIn profiles. The company had developed its own system of battery pack and charging algorithms.
Sherwood declined to remark.
Apple’s Project Titan that is focused on technology for electric vehicles now appears to veering out to include electric motorcycles. Although it struck offers with Harley-Davidson and others, the contracts weren’t profitable.
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They include Seth LaForge, an engineer on Google’s self-driving auto project, and Jon Wagner, Tesla’s director of battery engineering – an impressive tally for a company that never numbered more than about 50 employees.
