The Information has released a report on the profile of the Sumner brothers, who once worked on the Siri team for Apple but are now on the company's secretive Project Titan.
Tucked within that report is the fact that the launch date of the long-rumored electric Apple Car has been pushed back a year, with the release now expected to be in 2021.
According to the report, the delay was caused by a few challenges that Project Titan has run into. The Sumner brothers who are the topic of the article are said to be developing software that will capture the massive amounts of data each Apple Car would generate, with the three siblings also said to possibly be involved in purchasing and configuring the servers needed by Apple.
It was suggested that the data would be uploaded to servers owned by Apple, which will allow the company to develop self-driving car technology and boost its capabilities. However, to be able to handle such a huge load of data, Apple will need to make drastic improvements to its cloud infrastructure.
Tesla Motors, for example, has signed up Amazon Web Services as a partner to be able to handle the demands of its technology. A self-driving car is capable of generating up to as much as 10 GB of data for every mile it travels, according to the CEO of mapping technology provider for self-driving systems DeepMap, and the project that the Sumner brothers could be working on for the Apple Car could very well be a solution to handle this load.
It is not yet clear, however, if the self-driving capabilities of the Apple Car will allow it to be fully autonomous, or if the technology can be activated and deactivated by users, similar to Tesla's controversial Autopilot mode.
In addition to the computing power issues, the departure of Project Titan head Steve Zadesky due to personal reasons early this year has caused a significant amount of disruption in the progress of the Apple Car, as new leadership had to be chosen to replace him.
Apple has continued to deflect and ignore all questions on Project Titan and the Apple Car, despite the increasing amounts of evidence on the initiative. All that can be done for now is to wait for Apple to make an official announcement on the vehicle, but with the reported delay, it might already be too late for Apple to step into a strong foothold in the electric car industry by then.
