It’s sure been a while since we’ve heard anything regarding Apple’s alleged car plans. Earlier this year, if you recall, The Wall Street Journal reported that Tim Cook had authorized the creation of a 1,000 person team tasked with exploring the development of an electric vehicle capable of competing with Tesla.
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That being the case, Apple, as it’s often prone to do, has been populating its secretive car development team with talented employees from other divisions within Apple. Now, according to a report in The Register, the internal poaching has gotten so extensive that many senior managers within Apple have started voicing their concern.
Sources familiar with the matter told El Reg that Apple has shifted so much staff towards its auto division that senior managers in other divisions are complaining about the loss of talent from their teams.
As The Register points out, if the strain on personnel is so great as to elicit a round of complaints from senior managers, it stands to reason that Apple’s car plans may be “more ambitious than your run-of-the-mill in-car infotainment system.”
9to5Mac not too long ago put together an exhaustive list which took a look at many of the folks Apple has brought onto its car development initiative. While a number of them come from automotive-related companies, there are still a solid number of folks who apparently joined the team from other product groups within Apple. This, though, shouldn’t come as much of a surprise given that Apple has a long history of shuffling around its A+ engineers to more pressing projects as need be.
Of course, the looming question above all of this remains unanswered: Just what in the world is Apple working on?
While most people have jumped on board the “Apple is obviously building a car” bandwagon, I personally think such a product is far fetched for a myriad of reasons I previously detailed over here. Is Apple perhaps exploring what would go into developing a car? Sure. Will that result in an Apple branded car on the roads by 2020? I wouldn’t bet on it.
