Apple has double-clicked new recruits to build a car, or a research and development bull.
On July 27, Bloomberg broke the news that Apple had hired a top Lamborghini car research and development manager to lead Apple to complete the design of future cars, which has not been disclosed.
The top R&D manager is Luigi Taraborrelli, who has been with Lamborghini for 20 years.
In March this year, Guo Mingxi, an analyst at Tianfeng International Securities, said that Apple's auto project team had been disbanded for a while, which made many netizens think that they were lonely. At the same time, he said, the team needs to be restructured in the next three to six months to achieve the goal of going public and mass production in 2025.
Obviously, Apple's car project has not died, and in the past two months, there have been big bulls in technology and research and development to join Apple car.
With the addition of Tara Borelli, Apple's car project has become active again.
01
In the industry for 20 years, Lamborghini's top R&D manager
Tara boreli first joined Lamborghini in October 2001 as head of simulation.
For 20 years at Lamborghini, he has been responsible for the technical department, most recently as Head of Chassis and Vehicle Dynamics at Lamborghini.
The supervisor was involved in the design of a series of Lamborghini supercars, such as lamborghini Huracán Sterrato, Urus, Aventador, Huracán EVO, as well as limited edition models such as the Asterion concept car.
Without exception, they are all ultra-luxurious classic models.
Tara borelli's LinkedIn shows that as many as 17 projects have passed through his hands, including chassis research and development, steering, control, wheels and other projects, suspension and so on.
"I help the company design and develop supercars to evoke emotions in users." Speaking in LinkedIn, Taramoreli said, "I have deep technical expertise, management skills, and the ability to promote and lead organizational change and innovation. ”
At present, Tarabolelli's LinkedIn does not show that the latest employer is Apple, but it has left Lamborghini in May.
With a wealth of experience, Taramorelli will be one of the most senior R&D managers in Apple's electric vehicle team, which will also bring more possibilities to Apple cars.
Although Apple's Titan project has been twisting and turning, the people it has recruited are almost all leaders in the original company or a certain field.
In May, for example, Apple recruited Desi Ujkashevic, a female executive who had worked at Ford Ford for 31 years, to work on vehicle engineering and safety. Last year, Ulrich Kranz, the former CEO of electric vehicle maker Cano and the father of bmw's i-series, also joined Apple To build cars.
Earlier, Apple also included Stuart Ball, Tesla's head of autopilot, and Doug Field, tesla vice president who once led the mass production of model 3, was also recruited by Apple.
Although these executives are very mobile, they have undoubtedly made a great contribution to Apple's car-making project.
Today, Apple's car-making team includes talent from tech companies like Tesla, Rivian and Waymo, as well as design executives from ultra-luxury car companies like McLaren, Porsche, Aston Martin and Lamborghini.
Therefore, many people suspect that the future Apple car may have to go super-run.
02
What does an Apple car look like?
In fact, after many rounds of exposure, many people have sketched out the appearance of Apple cars.
In early July, foreign media The Information published an in-depth report titled "Apple's Eight Years of Efforts to Build Self-Driving Cars", which exposed the latest design of Apple Cars:
The four seats will be placed in opposite directions, allowing passengers to talk to each other face-to-face, while there is also a curved roof similar to the Roof of the Volkswagen Beetle.
Apple is also said to be designing a liftable trunk that can be raised to facilitate entry and exit, and then automatically lowered when not in use. The screen with seat backs can also be automatically adjusted as needed, and there has even been a discussion of allowing passengers to sleep flat in the car.
Jony Ive, Apple's former design director who worked on Apple's car as an advisor, suggested that the Apple automotive team "should move closer to the weirdness of vehicle design and not try to hide its sensors."
This means that apple cars are likely to look different from regular cars, and self-driving sensors will also be exposed to the outside of the car.
Apple wants approval from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to keep new cars without steering wheels and brakes, and hired NHTSA's chief consultant Jonathan Morrison last year, according to a person familiar with the matter.
It's just that at this stage for Apple Cars, the difficulty lies in how to disguise its self-driving cars in the public test stage, after all, the wind and grass about Apple's car have attracted much attention, and if you don't pay attention, you will be exposed clean.
The in-depth report said that Apple's test car will be more like the final production version of the model, as early as or next year on the road.
In terms of self-driving technology, Apple's car-making team has crafted a number of demonstration videos that were directly shown to Apple CEO Tim Cook and other executives.
Last August, several Apple self-driving cars drove about 40 miles (about 64.4 kilometers) in Montana and used drones to film a video of self-driving cars traveling from Montana to the ski resort town of Big Sky.
03
8 years of car building, 8 years of ups and downs
Whether the road is a real hammer or a lace news, the news about Apple's car has never stopped.
As early as 2014, Apple began to prepare for the car, approving and launching a car project called Titan .
But 8 years later, except for CarPlay, which was launched last month, there has been no official announcement, not even a ppt.
On the contrary, during this period, various news continued, such as team dissolution, executive departure and job hopping, testing obstacles and other troubles, making Apple's car difficult to produce.
In March this year, the famous analyst Guo Mingxi revealed that Apple's car-making team has been disbanded, and mass production may be difficult in 2025. This can't help but make people wonder, does Apple still have a spectrum for making cars?
The Information report provides an in-depth analysis of the difficulties and efforts Apple has made in the past 8 years.
Originally, Apple built cars to improve the driving experience, rather than the current hot self-driving. At that time, Apple and Magna worked together to build an initial version of the car, which resembled a minivan.
For this car, Apple has also made great efforts to develop, for example, Apple has imagined how to let this car detect a driver heart attack and then drive them to the hospital. Or provide surround sound and noise cancellation technology to ensure that every passenger in the same car can listen to different music.
In addition, Apple's industrial design team has also come up with some radical ideas, in order to make the car safe enough, it is hoped that the main material of the car can be made of glass.
However, apple's driving experience has not yet been optimized, and turned to study autonomous driving, in order to facilitate testing, and even directly spent a lot of money ($125 million) to buy a test field.
The automatic driving that Apple wants to do is not the L3 and L4 levels that are still competed for by various car companies, but a fully automated driving that can be driven without a driver.
The shift from driving experience to autonomous driving was largely due to Jonathan Ive, Apple's head of industrial design at the time, who was adamantly opposed to building traditional electric vehicles. Jonathan Ive believes that the Apple cars of the future must be like the changes that Apple phones have triggered in the smartphone industry.
But not long after, Apple's design team began to adjust the direction of the car to the real car landing, or a compact car, the appearance is similar to the BMW i3.
At that time, Apple's self-driving software was not ready.
In 2017, Apple intends to roll out autonomous driving features in phases. It also worked with Volkswagen to develop a self-driving bus to transport Apple employees from the factory to the park. But then the cooperation with Volkswagen ended, the self-driving bus project was canceled, and the Titan project was put into the work of planning an autonomous driving route for Apple's test vehicles.
In the past 8 years of apple car manufacturing, the direction has been wavering, from the driving experience, to the landing of the real car, and then to today's automatic driving, in the process of continuous adjustment, increasing internal friction.
However, these 8 years of time are very precious for building cars.
For example, Wei Xiaoli, the three new force car companies, they were basically established around 2015, in the past seven or eight years, Wei Xiaoli has achieved the landing from concept to mass production delivery, and sales are still rising.
For the technology giant Apple, it is obviously not so easy, on the one hand, carrying the burden of this trillion-level market value, on the other hand, it does not want to be in the car manufacturing, which makes Apple's car manufacturing doomed to be somewhat difficult to produce.
In addition, CEO Cook, as the leader of the company, does not seem to be concerned about building cars. Previous news broke that Cook tended to stay away from product design and refused to visit the base of the car project in California, and was unwilling to invest resources in mass production of cars.