Apple shifts focus of Project Titan to autonomous car technology
Apple recently made a new hire that would suggest that its secretive from researching electric cars to self-driving ones, Bloomberg reports.
Project Titan鈥檚 newest team member is Dan Dodge. Mr. Dodge founded QNX, an operating system company BlackBerry acquired in 2010, which developed the navigation and connected device system currently used by Volkswagen and Ford, among others. He will be joining Apple鈥檚 car research and development team lead by Bob Mansfield, another recent hire.
Apple hasn't completely abandoned efforts to design an electric car. In the future, it could decide to partner with another company to produce parts, while Apple provides the software.聽With a poor second quarter report and a diminishing demand for the iPhone, Apple鈥檚 top selling product, the company is putting more effort into new product development. As a result Apple invested $2.6 billion in research and development over the past three months, up more than a quarter from the same time last year, according to Bloomberg.
鈥淭he products that are in R&D, there is quite a bit of investment in there for products and services that are not currently shipping or derivations of what is currently shipping,鈥� chief executive officer Tim Cook . 鈥淭here鈥檚 a lot of stuff that we鈥檙e doing beyond the current products.鈥�
The location of some of Apple鈥檚 newest offices also point to autonomous technology. In 2014, it , in order to have better access to the wealth of speech recognition experts in Boston as it seeks to improve Siri, and earlier this year Apple opened a research and development center in the Ottawa suburb Kanata,聽.
Apple, which prides itself on startling innovation, may be hoping that its autonomous vehicles will pay off in shock value, as the initial public fascination with electric cars wears off somewhat. But there are already聽a lot of high profile players in the race toward autonomous car technology, from Google, to Microsoft, to Volvo, and Apple could easily get lost in the shuffle as some 30聽听肠辞尘辫别迟别.
There are still obvious safety concerns to be addressed before fully self-driving vehicles are common on the road, particularly since humans are less likely to accept machine malfunction than human error.
鈥淲e have to create perfection in the collision-avoidance systems before we have the car drive itself,鈥� Mark Rosenker, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, . 鈥淭here are nuances to these technologies that we have not yet perfected.鈥�
The release date for Apple鈥檚 car, whatever form it ends up taking, is slated for 2020, although people working for Project Titan have said there have been setbacks because of technical issues and a lack of direction, making project completion in聽.
