Apple runs into a hiccup in getting Project Titan off the ground, as the lead of the electric car initiative Steve Zadesky is about to leave because of "personal reasons."
The project is reportedly Apple's venture into the electric mobile industry, where sources say that the company could be working on autonomous cars, an amped up mapping technology and digital license plates among others.
Zadesky is an Apple veteran who has been working in the company for 16 years, where two of those were focused on supervising the undertakings of Project Titan.
As mentioned earlier, his decision stemmed from personal reasons. A person "familiar with the matter" says that it wasn't linked in any way to his performance, according to The Wall Street Journal. However, the people behind the project mentioned that the team had come across a couple of problems in "laying out clear goals."
Before Zadesky was employed at Apple in 1999, he was an engineer at Ford. Given his expertise, he received the task of thinking up a vision for the electric car product and increasing the automotive team of the Cupertino brand by threefold, which already consisted of about 600 members in September.
Prior to the automobile sector, he was involved with the development of the iPod and iPhone, and in 2014, Apple gave him the go signal to investigate a way for the company to penetrate the electric car market.
To set things straight, he is still at Apple for now, and when his departure will take effect remains unclear. Perhaps he is still grooming a replacement, but the specifics are currently vague at best. At any rate, Zadesky's pending leave will cause a considerable impact in the overall progress of Project Titan.
It's also worth mentioning that Apple is purportedly setting the deadline up to an unfeasible degree, where members of the team remarked that the objectives are unachievable.
Project Titan is pegged with a ship date of 2019. Apple's definition of "ship date" doesn't exactly translate to a solid release date of when customers will be able to get their hands on a product, as it can just be the date when the people working on a particular project will sign off.
To date, Apple hasn't made any official announcement about developing a car yet, but it has enlisted several experts of the automobile industry and battery technology and autonomous driving scenes. As such, Apple CEO Tim Cook has said before that "there will be a massive change in that industry."
