Apple (AAPL) Scales Down Scope of Car Project - NYT

New York Times technology reporter Daisuke Wakabayashi outlines Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) journey to develop a self-driving car, from past to present, eventually offering insight into the future of the autonomous car unit, called project "Titan" in a detailed article published Wednesday.

The piece describes Apple's current decision to scale down the scope of project Titan to what Apple does best, develop the "underlying technology" that will power the hardware (car). While this is a departure from the original project Titan mission to design an Apple-branded automobile, the shift provides insight into the company's design process.

According to Wakabayashi, Apple engineers prefer to work on technology, attacking all verticals of a product vision including design, production, hardware, software with the hopes of controlling every aspect of a product. That strategy took the company down many roads with Apple engineers looking at every part of the car for evolution.

In the beginning they looked at silent motorized doors, a car interior without gas pedals or steering wheels and information displays powered by virtual or augmented reality. In fact, Apple literally tried to reinvent the wheel before running into trouble with over direction of the project, as "a team within Titan investigated the possibility of using spherical wheels - round like a globe - instead of the traditional, round ones, because spherical wheels could allow the car better lateral movement. But the car project ran into trouble, said the five people familiar with it, dogged by its size and by the lack of a clearly defined vision of what Apple wanted in a vehicle. Team members complained of shifting priorities and arbitrary or unrealistic deadlines."

There was debate among Apple executives on whether to focus on a fully-autonomous automotive solution preferred by Jonathan Ive or the semi-autonomous car, desired by Steve Zadesky, originally in charge of project Titan. Jonathan Ive won that battle and Apple moved forward with the fully-autonomous design path, but the wars continued onto the operating system's programming language. Some executives wanted to use Apple's own programming language, Swift, while other's preferred the industry standard C++.

Eventually Zadesky left the project for personal reasons and Bob Mansfield, an experienced in-house hardware engineer, was hired to streamline project Titan, resulting in Apple's current goal to develop the underlying self-driving technology, instead of building a car. In April, Apple was granted a permit by the California DMV to test their autonomous driving technology, while morale surrounding project Titan has improved under Mr. Mansfield's leadership, all but confirming Mansfield was the right choice.

Wakabayashi goes on to explain why it is important for Apple to get this right, saying "many companies are pursuing driverless technology and see it as a game changer for car ownership and transportation, no one has figured out how to cash in yet... one of the biggest challenges is holding onto talented engineers because self-driving technology is one of the hottest things in Silicon Valley, and Apple is hardly the only company working on it."

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