Apple has been working on the self-driving car project, codenamed “Titan” for a long time now and as per the latest details, Apple is looking to shuffle the leadership of this project. As per Bloomberg, the team of engineers for Apple self-driving car will now report John Giannandrea. He heads the artificial intelligence department in Apple, which also looks after the voice-based digital assistant Siri.
John Giannandrea currently reports directly to CEO Tim Cook as the leader of machine learning and AI strategy. There have not been many details that have come out in the past regarding this project and Apple has been trying to be more secretive as well. The company is currently testing the car in California. Apple has also partnered with companies like Volkswagen to get the necessary hardware. Apple initially went on to build the entire thing, but then slowly shifted the focus more onto the software that will control the car.
The company also had to face a lot of issues in this project, where the employees were accused of trading the project details with third parties. Apple has also acquired the self-drive startup called Drive.ai in June 2019 including all the company assets. Also, the company logged 80,000 miles in 2018 for testing purposes and only 7,544 miles in 2019. It seems like this is a major reason why Apple has been making a change in the hierarchy, to make sure that the project does not get left behind.