Here we go again: a famous Ford engineer, Desi Ujkashevic, who has worked for 31 years in the Detroit giant and most recently head of the “Automotive Safety Engineering” sector, was hired at Apple to work on the iCar project. As usual, the hunt for rumors about the debut of the highly anticipated self-driving car of the iPhone company has been unleashed again on the net.
Apple is working hard on the project, which officially kicked off in 2014 and which Tim Cook himself, the company’s almighty CEO, baptized with the name of “Project Titan”. Former Ford executive Doug Field, engineer Steve Zadesky and Mercedes-Benz R&D manager for North America Johann Jungwirth were in the project too at the time.
The project was so serious that it involved official visits by Tim Cook to the true automotive industry “big powers”. In 2015 he went to Germany to meet BMW executives and shortly after Apple executives went to Leipzig to examine the production of the automaker’s i3 EV.
Then in 2018 Apple announced a deal with the Volkswagen Group to convert the automaker’s T6 Transporter vans into autonomous shuttles for employees on the new Silicon Valley campus.
Meanwhile, the i3 has gone out of production. Volkswagen has changed its mind and invested $ 2.6 billion in the Ford-backed Argo with its new ID electric minivan instead. Also, the best talents in the automotive sector have abandoned Apple. However, Apple never gives up and has hired others to continue with Project Titan. That must be simpler when you have a market capitalization of nearly $ 2.5 trillion and a reserve of over $ 200 billion in cash. Nevertheless, it must not be extremely easy too to keep alive a complicated program like this one, that is not yet producing anything. Truth though is that there is not a better time than today to see projects like this become a reality since we are living a violent transition to electrification and witnessing the growing importance of software in cars.