Ming-Chi Kuo: Apple’s “Titan” car project will be restarted by the end of the year.

Is Apple’s plan to build a car coming back to life again?

Just now, Ming-Chi Kuo, who can be called Apple’s “chief whistleblower,” tweeted that according to his latest investigation, Apple is “likely” to rebuild the Apple Car team, most likely this year. Before the end of the year.

It’s a coincidence that about half a year ago, it was Ming-Chi Kuo who also broke the news on Twitter that Apple’s “Titan” car-building team had It has been disbanded for some time.

Is the "Titan" team, which was just rumored to be disbanded, about to start reorganizing again so soon? It seems Apple is still determined not to give up.

Apple’s 8-year dream of building a car: Cook personally stood up

In fact, Apple’s car-building plan was launched as early as 8 years ago.

Back in 2014, Apple launched Project Titan, with more than 1,000 automotive experts and engineers working in a secret facility near the company’s Cupertino headquarters. Location to develop electric vehicles.

This plan can be described as ambitious. It is said that the car to be built will not only have no steering wheel, but also no accelerator pedal, and can be driven without user intervention at all.

As the "next star product", Apple Car can not only provide "better hardware, software and service integration", but also be "significantly better than ordinary electric vehicles" and position itself as " Very high-end."

With the success of Apple chips, the possibility of using self-developed high-performance processors in self-driving cars has also increased. This "most advanced component Apple has ever developed" will be responsible for handling the incredible AI workload required by self-driving cars.

However, due to various problems, the "Titan Project" has turned and changed many times. Fortunately, research and development seems to have always continued.

Generally speaking, Apple is not willing to share too many details about its projects. But when it comes to automotive software, black box silence doesn’t seem to work due to regulatory reasons.

In June 2017, Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly talked about Apple’s progress in self-driving software, confirming the company’s project with rare candor.

Cook said: "We are focusing on autonomous driving systems. This is a core technology that we think is very important. We see it as the crown jewel of all AI projects. This It may be one of the most difficult ongoing AI projects.”

Of course, Cook’s remarks may also be because someone discovered at the beginning of 2017 that Apple had several A car loaded with sensors and cameras is being tested on public roads in California.

However, considering Apple’s ambitions and actual progress in self-driving cars, it may not be realized even by 2025. ​

Nearly all the executives poached are left

"Project Titan" initially had more than a thousand employees , but after many personnel changes.

In 2016, one of the original leaders of the project, Steve Zadesky, left the company and was replaced by a poached Tesla vice president of automotive engineering. President Chris Porritt takes over.

In July 2016, Bowen, a former longtime Apple executive, allegedly gained control of the project after Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering Dan Riccio gained control of the project. Bob Mansfield was hired back to work on the project part-time.

In August and September 2016, “Project Titan” had major layoffs. More than 120 software engineers responsible for the car's operating system and testing procedures were laid off, and hundreds of hardware engineers responsible for the car body, suspension system and chassis disappeared from the workforce.

It is said that the remaining employees at that time were not only writing autonomous driving code, but also responsible for building sensors and simulators for actual testing. Software engineers and hardware engineers were shouldering the burden.

However, the 2016 Apple Car project also poached a big figure: Alexander Hitzinger, Porsche’s head of racing projects. Reports at the time said he was poached to do "something that would have a significant and direct impact on society."

Hitzinger worked at Apple until January 2019, when he was poached by Volkswagen to join its commercial vehicle division.

In March 2017, Apple seemed to be stepping up its efforts in building cars: it established a research laboratory in Switzerland, with staff from ETH Zurich, specializing in computer vision, robotics and Visual navigation.

In April 2017, a team of four people formerly employed by NASA were working on Apple’s automotive business, specifically its self-driving software.

According to the "Wall Street Journal" article, three engineers on the test evaluation project had previously worked at NASA's famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory on projects including 3D object detection and motion planning algorithms. There are results.

In August 2017, Apple hired more employees for its self-driving project.

Insider magazine’s report cited a source familiar with Apple technology and other similar self-driving platform technologies, saying that Apple’s new hires are focused on those with experience in producing self-driving car software. people.

These engineers, previously handpicked by Apple from traditional automakers, include employees who specialize in braking, suspension and other automotive mechanical systems.

Apple poached John Giannandrea from Google in April 2018 to lead its machine learning and AI strategic tasks. Part of this is said to involve self-driving car systems that rely on these technologies.

In June 2018, Apple hired Jamie Waydo, a former senior engineer at Waymo and a member of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to join the team.

In the same month, it was reported that YouTube celebrity and former NASA engineer Mark Rober was assisting Apple in developing a VR system for its car project. Doug Field, who served as vice president of Mac hardware engineering at Apple, was poached back to the company in August 2018 after five years at Tesla.

A report in August 2018 stated that Apple poached at least 46 employees from Tesla that year, some of whom were former colleagues who had been fired by Tesla. Poached.

In December 2018, Tesla senior designer Andrew Kim was poached to work at Apple. During his tenure at Tesla, Kim worked on vehicle interior design, focusing on dashboard layout.

In early 2019, there were reports that Apple laid off more than 200 employees working on Project Titan, which was internally referred to as a "team reorganization." Apple later confirmed plans to lay off 190 people from the project.

In March 2019, Apple hired Michael Schwekutsch. Schwekutsch was Tesla's vice president of engineering and has extensive experience in powertrain development, which strongly indicates that vehicle development is still the focus of the Apple Car project.

In June 2019, Apple stepped up its autonomous driving efforts by acquiring Drive.ai, a startup in the field. As confirmed by Apple, the acquisition will bring dozens of Drive.ai’s employees, new car prototypes and other assets into Apple’s car-making project.

In July 2019, Apple hired former Tesla Vice President of Engineering Steve MacManus, a veteran of the automotive industry. McManus has the vague title of "senior executive" at Apple, but he should be a member of the "Titan" team.

As of June 2021, Dave Scott, Jaime Waydo and Benjamin Lyon, technical executives of Apple’s self-driving unit (Benjamin Lyon) resigned one after another.

In September 2021, Doug Field quit the Apple Car team and resigned from Apple again.

In late January 2022, according to Mark Gurman, Bloomberg’s technology reporter in charge of Apple, Joe Bass, who had worked at Apple for 7 years and was the former software engineering project director of the automotive team, had resigned.

With his departure, almost all the Apple Car project executives that Apple had poached before left.

Ming-Chi Kuo’s divine predictions

In technology headlines, the name "Ming-Chi Kuo" appears quite frequently.

Since 2010, he has been predicting new Apple products, and he has repeatedly guessed correctly. He is known as the "strongest" Apple concept stock analyst and the "magic stick" in the technology industry.

Over the years, Ming-Chi Kuo’s forecasts of Apple’s new product data have always been very reliable. Although in Cook's opinion, forecasting through data sourced from the supply chain is a poor way to do it, Guo's forecasting record is quite impressive.

As a "leaker", Ming-Chi Kuo's strength is the details and specifications of products, which sometimes may include very fine points, such as color, size, chipset and ports. But he couldn't accurately predict device names and release dates, since both are typically determined very late in the production process.

His accuracy is very powerful in history, and he is worthy of the title of "Magic Stick". In fact, some reports came to fruition years after his predictions.

The great thing about Ming-Chi Kuo is that he can not only use the data obtained to predict future Apple products, but also provide guidance for product sales-based on component order volume, he will Derive sales data and then derive the products they expect to sell based on previous supply chain inventory reports.

Of course, his guidance is not necessarily that strong in this regard. While these inventory reports may be accurate, because Apple's supply chain is so diverse, knowing only orders for one product component doesn't always provide the most comprehensive information.

While working at Digitimes, he first came to attention for predicting the ship window of the unreleased iPhone 4 model.

He joined Concord Securities in 2011 and KGI Securities in 2013. Over the next decade, Kuo rose to prominence in Apple’s news circles.

When fellow forecasting guru Mark Gurman doesn’t have inside information, Ming-Chi Kuo usually does. It is because of these two people that most of Apple's news is already well known before it is released.

In 2018, Ming-Chi Kuo left KGI Securities and joined Tianfeng International in China. He is still working at this company today and has continued to output accurate information about Apple products and plans. Forecasting and analysis.

Why can Ming-Chi Kuo make so many divine predictions? It has a lot to do with his analyst work.

Working as an analyst at an investment service company such as a securities company and Tianfeng International, he can obtain intelligence through the product's supply chain. Therefore, he has more opportunities to gain access to Apple's supply chain, obtain first-hand information, and then publish an "Investment Guide" through screening, sorting, and analysis.

His prediction of Apple’s 2014 advertising campaign was almost 100% accurate

In 2012, Ming-Chi Kuo accurately predicted that Apple would launch The MacBook Air with Thunderbolt became an instant success.

There are also key information about the local gold version of IPhone 5s, IPhone 6, the new iPhone with LCD screen, the new iPad Pro with USB-C interface, the new iPhone with Touch ID The success predictions of MacBook Air and other products have made Ming-Chi Kuo even more famous.

And this time, is his prediction about Apple’s new car-building plan accurate? let us wait and see.

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