Apple slashed their ambitions car, leaving in its wake hundreds of workers without employment and a new direction that, for now, does not intend to manufacture its own car, according to people close to the project.
Hundreds of members of the team car, composed of about a thousand people were reassigned, fired or left of their own volition in recent months, said the sources, who asked not to be identified because the settings are private.
the new directors of the initiative, known internally as a Project Titan, is reenfocaron to develop a driving system autonomous which gives Apple the flexibility to partner with car manufacturers existing as to re-design your own vehicle in the future, they said.
Apple kept unchanged the number of employees of the team by hiring people to work with the new approach, according to another source.
Apple Executives gave a time limit to the team car until the end of next year to test the feasibility of the conduction system of autonomous and decide on the final orientation of the project, said two of the sources.
The spokesman of Apple, Tom Neumayr, declined to comment.
The new approach and within reach after months of disagreements strategic, continuous changes in management and problems in the supply chain to the inside of the secret laboratories of the automobile of Apple in Sunnyvale, California, a short distance from its headquarters in Cupertino.
Apple is not the first firm to realize that the domain of mobile devices and the software updates are not a guarantee of success in the world of automotive.
Google of the Alphabet, he learned the lesson after building their own vehicles and look for partners. Your project car also suffered layoffs.
investors in technology are also undecided. They are used to increase your profit margins, while the car manufacturers survive with net margins far below 10 percent.
"For a self of quality with the brand Apple could get a good margin (profit)," he said Eric Paul Dennis, an analyst at the Center for Automotive Research. "Probably were not willing to compromise on issues of quality" that could damage the image of its products, he added.
Apple started the Titan project in 2014, with big ambitions to impact an automotive sector consulting firm McKinsey estimated to reach 6.7 billion dollars by 2030.
The manufacturer of iPhones embarked in a wave of hiring and a car designed by Apple would at the beginning of the decade of the 2020s. What I expected was to revolutionize the cars the way that the iPhone transformed the mobile telephony sector in 2007.
Towards the end of 2015, the project was affected by internal conflicts. The managers were arguing over the direction of the project, according to people with knowledge of the operations. "We noticed an incredible failure in leadership", said one of the sources.
At the beginning of 2016, the head of the Project, Steve Zadesky, a exingeniero of Ford and one of the first designers of the iPod, he left Titan. Zadesky, who is still at Apple, declined to comment.
Zadesky left his post in the hands of his boss, Dan Riccio, adding up to greater responsibilities, which already included the annual renewal of the engineering of the iPhone, the iPad and the Mac.
Bob Mansfield, manager of the highly acknowledged that helped to develop the original iPad, he returned in April after completing a temporary charge on Apple to lead the team.
About a month later, Mansfield took the stage at an audience of Silicon Valley crowded with hundreds of employees of Titan to announce the strategic change, according to people who attended the meeting.
Mansfield explained that he had analyzed the project and determined that Apple had to change the tactic of becoming a direct competitor to Tesla to build a common platform for driving autonomous.
In the following months, the engineers began to move out. Some were in the midst of doubts about the security of their jobs in the face of scepticism that a car Apple could someday come to market. Others were dismissed.
In August, a wave of employees were trimmed from the workforce, followed by a second part in September.
More than 120 software engineers working on an operating system for automobiles, and testing, were also dismissed. In addition, several hundreds of hardware engineers who worked on the chassis of the car, suspensions and shock absorbers, also left.
Stand out John Wright, a longtime Apple executive who led the software team, left the project; also Dan Dodge, creator of the program for cars QNX BlackBerry, which had an important role in the development of the design of the car of the Apple.
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