Apple shakes up electric vehicle team, places Bob Mansfield in charge of 'Project Titan' - report
After taking a reduced role at Apple for the last few years, hardware engineer and former executive Bob Mansfield has returned to prominence at the company, and is now in charge of the company's ambitious electric vehicle project, according to a new report.
Citing unnamed sources, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that former senior vice president has assumed control of "Project Titan," the alleged code name for Apple's autonomous vehicle efforts. The move comes months after it was revealed that company veteran Steve Zadesky, the former head of the "Apple Car" project, was leaving Apple.
Taking control of arguably Apple's most ambitious project ever is a big change for Mansfield, who announced in June of 2012 that he would be retiring from the company. Just a month after that, it was instead announced that Mansfield was staying in an advisory role to Chief Executive Tim Cook.
For the next year, he held the title of Senior Vice President of Technologies, but left that role in July of 2013. After exiting the company's executive team, he continued to work on "special projects" under Cook.
Apple's Bob Mansfield. | Source: Apple
The change in leadership comes only days after a separate report claimed that Apple has internally delayed its vehicular project's projected launch until 2021. Earlier reports had pegged the so-called "Apple Car" for a 2020 debut.
Though Apple has remained mum on "Project Titan," AppleInsider has traced breadcrumbs to unearth details about the effort, including the discovery of a secretive facility in Sunnyvale, Calif., believed to be the home base for development. There, Apple is believed to have hidden behind a shell corporation named SixtyEight Research LLC.
Citing unnamed sources, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that former senior vice president has assumed control of "Project Titan," the alleged code name for Apple's autonomous vehicle efforts. The move comes months after it was revealed that company veteran Steve Zadesky, the former head of the "Apple Car" project, was leaving Apple.
Taking control of arguably Apple's most ambitious project ever is a big change for Mansfield, who announced in June of 2012 that he would be retiring from the company. Just a month after that, it was instead announced that Mansfield was staying in an advisory role to Chief Executive Tim Cook.
For the next year, he held the title of Senior Vice President of Technologies, but left that role in July of 2013. After exiting the company's executive team, he continued to work on "special projects" under Cook.
Apple's Bob Mansfield. | Source: Apple
The change in leadership comes only days after a separate report claimed that Apple has internally delayed its vehicular project's projected launch until 2021. Earlier reports had pegged the so-called "Apple Car" for a 2020 debut.
Though Apple has remained mum on "Project Titan," AppleInsider has traced breadcrumbs to unearth details about the effort, including the discovery of a secretive facility in Sunnyvale, Calif., believed to be the home base for development. There, Apple is believed to have hidden behind a shell corporation named SixtyEight Research LLC.
Comments
"Dan leads the Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod engineering teams"
Anyone who believes an Apple car will see the light of day before 2021, if ever, is kidding themselves.
And by then the big auto makers will have an insurmountable lead.
But.
I'm becoming increasingly nervous about the pace of product improvements at Apple. There is a whiff of staleness throughout the lineup. It's particularly bad with the Mac, but it's not just the Mac.
In addition, the electric / autonomous car market is going to be extremely competitive. When the iPhone came out, it was significantly ahead of the competition. I'm not sure Apple can pull that off with a car, particularly given the staleness of their existing products. After reading the Tesla Master Plan part 2, I'm feeling pretty skeptical that Apple is going to have any better ideas that Tesla.
My hope is that 18 months from now, I'll look back and see a slew of groundbreaking product introductions. I'll realize that the staleness that I'm perceiving now was due to a slight delay in the launch of multiple groundbreaking products that re-established Apple's leadership in all its markets. And perhaps then I'll feel more confident that Apple can be a leader in cars.
However, if in 18 months those hopes are not realized and the product lineup continues to seem stale, then I will reluctantly conclude that Apple needs new leadership, and that a Tesla acquisition or merger might be something for the board to seriously consider, bringing Musk in as CEO.
I really hope it doesn't come to that.
Bob Mansfield has been instrumental most of the greatest products from Apple.
That's why Tim fought to keep him on board.
Now I expect great things for project Titan.
Go Apple!
For the record, EV penetration is less that one percentage point in the U.S. and there are few barriers to entry for manufacturers. I'm not seeing any insurmountable lead that Tesla will have in the market for any determined new entrant.
As for the Mac's, they aren't being refreshed because there is so little real performance benefit from Intel releases of late. Apple will wait until it gets Intel parts that support the various features that they are pushing; I'm guessing Kaby Lake will be a design in for the next future Mac Book Pro updates.
from PCs to music players to phones to tablets to watches. This has all been hashed out before, but involving
not being first-to-market, but not being "me too" either. Vis-a-vis Tesla, Musk and crew's offerings seem
to serve a similar role for autos, helping to upend the internal-combustion milieu.
What is hard for me to imagine is what is possibly horribly wrong with a Tesla that Apple
can meaningfully improve upon. Is there some amazingly better (and ultra-secret) battery tech
that Apple has in the wings? Is Tesla's user interface so misguided that some CarPlay+Siri-like
offering should take it's place? To go from making gadgets generally smaller than a breadbox
to something much larger just seems out-of-place. Further, the automotive industry doesn't
"impedance-match" with the outsized profit-margins that Apple has heretofore enjoyed.
Indeed, perhaps yet another reason that Apple needs to eventually transition their Mac line (or create a new line) that utilizes their own in-house A-series chips. While Apple can't change the fundamentals of transistor technology, what they can do is add more functions into a SoC that provides new functionality beyond the general CPU/GPU, as they already do with their iOS devices. Image & video manipulation/editing, compression, secure components, supporting biometric sensors, etc. And/or they can have more than one SoC package, since the costs can be much lower than paying Intel.
Waiting a couple of years for a 10-20% improvement in performance isn't going to get anyone to upgrade.
People run articles about how Musk is out of ideas, and it was the same for Jobs. Running your company in such a manner as to strive for slightly more fawning editorials is no way to succeed.
At least most Toyota units are standard 2 DIN brackets and you can rip out the factory one and put in a after-market unit like Alpine or Kenwood.
Land Rover's App idea has some interesting attributes, but I'd prefer if they were able to integrate it WITH Carplay, rather than reject CarPlay .