Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne has a piece of advice for Apple regarding Silicon Valley's worst-kept secret that it is building an electrical vehicle: don't do it on your own but if you must, have an established car maker mass produce a custom vehicle for you according to your specifications.
“If they have any urges to make a car, I'd advise them to lie down and wait until the feeling passes,” Marchionne told journalists at the Geneva auto show.
According to The Silicon Valley Business Journal, Apple in November 2015 quietly leased a 96,000-square-foot site in Sunnyvale, California which used to be Pepsi's bottling plant.
Interestingly enough, this industrial property is located in the neighborhood of a complex of warehouses and offices which Apple leased about a year ago for purposes unknown to the public (hint: permits mention things like an “auto work area” and a “repair garage”).
Don't expect the Apple Car to start hitting stores anytime soon, says Tim Cook. During Apple's annual shareholders meeting on Friday, the CEO responded to a question regarding the rumored vehicle, suggesting the project is far from launching.
Business Insider has Cook's full response from the Q&A session: "Do you remember when you were a kid, and Christmas Eve it was so exciting, you weren't sure what was going to be downstairs? Well, it's going to be Christmas Eve for a while."
In a Q&A with Adam Lashinsky of Fortune published Monday, Apple's boss Tim Cook suggested that his company ultimately may decide not to make a car at all, but hinted Apple is “exploring” various “technologies” and “products” in general.
He also responded to concerns about peak iPhone, talked about how Apple behaves in a down cycle and how the company’s culture is evolving, revealed that Apple will start moving into its upcoming iSpaceship in 2017 and explained why services are important in Apple’s product mix, among other topics of interest.
AppleInsider reported Monday that Apple's automotive ambitions are at crossroads as the company has reportedly instituted a hiring freeze on the 1,000+ person team responsible for so-called Project Titan after a recent progress review.
Jony Ive, Apple's Chief Design Officer, is said to have “expressed his displeasure” with the group's headway following a post-holiday review of the secretive project.
During a recent trip to Silicon Valley, Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche told German weekly Welt am Sonntag that Apple and Google have made more progress on automotive projects than he had assumed, Reuters reported Monday.
“Our impression was that these companies can do more and know more than we had previously assumed. At the same time they have more respect for our achievements than we thought,” the executive told the paper.
Apple is losing long-time veteran and VP of Product Design Steve Zadesky, reports The Wall Street Journal. Zadesky has been with the company for 16 years, where he worked on the iPhone and iPod, and most recently spearheaded its ambitious automobile efforts.
Apple has registered a handful of rather interesting domain names within the last few weeks. As noted by MacRumors, the company purchased three top-level domain names in December including apple.car, apple.cars and apple.auto, through sponsored registrar MarkMonitor.
The acquisitions only posted on Whois this morning, and they aren't active yet, but given the ongoing chatter regarding Apple's secret car project, they do arouse curiosity. There's certainly a precedent of the firm purchasing domain names for rumored projects: iCloud and iPhone 4.
Apple recently added digital license plate expert Rónán Ó Braonáin to its growing Project Titan team, reports Electrek.co. The site points to Braonáin's LinkedIn profile, which notes that he served as Director of Engineering at Reviver before becoming a "Secret Agent" working on special projects at Apple.
Before working at Reviver, a company that makes digital license plates, Braonáin wrote fleet management software to read data from electric vehicles for Vision Fleet. And prior to that, he worked at German auto manufacturer BMW as a software engineer on the team responsible for its connected car apps.
According to the famous iPod creator, former Apple engineer and Nest founder Tony Fadell, Steve Jobs did consider an idea of Apple building a car as far back as 2008, but ultimately decided not to move forward because he had other projects on his mind.
In a video interview with Bloomberg, Fadell said that Jobs and himself discussed how a hypothetical Apple car would we build, what features it would have, what a dashboard would be like and so forth.
Apple has hired Nvidia's director of deep learning, Jonathan Cohen, Re/code reported today. As is its wont, Apple declined to comment but news of Cohen's hiring has since been officially confirmed via his LinkedIn profile, in which he states that he's been with Apple since earlier this month.
The publication speculates that Cohen might be joining Apple's autonomous car project in unknown capacity. As you know, Apple is rumored to be developing an electric or autonomous car, dubbed Project Titan.
Apple CEO Tim Cook is one of the few people in the technology industry who have an uncanny insight into the future of technology so little wonder his vague hints at his company's next moves are being carefully scrutinized by pundits and examined for meaning.
When it comes to the automobile industry, Cook has once again deflected iCar-related questions, refusing to acknowledge the existence of the company's rumored electric car, dubbed Project Titan.
That, however, didn't stop him from teasing that the car industry is at an “inflection point for massive change” during his interview last night at the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.D Live conference in Laguna Beach, California.