After news of an upcoming autonomous vehicle from Apple broke throughout this and last year, the company has reportedly lost multiple of the autonomous driving department’s top managers in recent months.
According to Bloomberg, Apple lost multiple top self-driving car department managers in the past few months, including Dave Scott in robotics, Jaime Waydo in autonomous safety and regulation, and Benjamin Lyon, the car team’s original creator.
Scott departed to become Chief Executive Officer at Hyperfine, a healthcare company dedicated to MRI systems, while Waydo joined fellow autonomous vehicle startup Cavnue. Lyon left Apple to join Astra, a satellite company, as Chief Engineer.
Apple’s self-driving department is run by Doug Field, previously a top Tesla engineer, and in this year alone, the company has hired a number of other former Tesla engineers.
Despite the fact that Apple doubled its road-testing in 2020 to reach up to 18,805 miles tested, the company still lags significantly behind other self-driving vehicles, with some of them even having reached three-quarters of a million miles tested in a single year.
While the self-driving Apple Car is predicted to be at least five years away by experts, the recent departures may signal something else going on at the company – and something else that could significantly affect an important future product for the tech company.
