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Tag: Apple car

  • Ex-Apple engineer pleads guilty to stealing documentation about the Apple Car

    Ex-Apple engineer pleads guilty to stealing documentation about the Apple Car

    A former Apple employee by the name of Xiaolang Zhang, who was arrested by federal agents in July 2018 just as he was about to board a flight from San Jose to China, pleaded guilty yesterday in federal court in San Jose. Zhang was charged with stealing computer files that contained secrets about Apple’s hush-hush car division. Zhang faces a sentence of up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
    The sentencing is scheduled to take place on November 14th. Apple claimed that Zhang downloaded an internal 25-page document that contained engineering schematics of a circuit board for a self-driving vehicle. He is alleged to have taken reference manuals and PDFs that featured descriptions of Apple’s automotive prototypes and prototype requirements. He had worked for Apple from 2015 to the time of his arrest and his last position with the company was as a hardware engineer on the team developing Apple’s self-driving car.
    Even after four years have gone by since Zhang was busted at San Jose airport, Apple has remained tight-lipped about the division developing its autonomous electric car. In the charging documents created by the FBI back in 2018, it says that 5,000 Apple employees knew about the project at the time, and that 2,700 had access to project materials and databases.
    Internal software used by Apple helps the company keep track of the employees who know about a certain project and they are forced to take in-person secrecy training according to the complaint filed with the court.

    Zhang originally took paternity leave and traveled to China, but Apple started to smell a rat when he returned from the country and quit. He said that he needed to return to China to take care of his mother. Zhang did tell Apple that he was going to work for Chinese electric vehicle company Xmotors and a suspicious Apple immediately blocked his access to Apple’s network.

    But Apple made this move after Zhang had accessed company databases to download documents and information. He was also caught red-handed (no pun intended) by Apple’s closed-circuit television system removing circuit boards and a Linux server from the lab.
    Zhang isn’t the only former Apple employee who tried to peddle secrets from Apple’s car division. Jizhong Chen is accused of stealing trade secrets from Apple’s car division in early 2019. A U.S. citizen, Chen was also planning on traveling to China. While he is represented by the same attorney defending Zhang, unlike the latter, Chen has yet to plead guilty and a trial date has not been scheduled.
    While things seem a bit slow at Apple’s car division, you know, with the new iPhone 14 series just a couple of weeks away from being announced, last month there was some news. With rumors circulating that Apple had decided to give up on the project, the company reportedly hired 20-year industry veteran Luigi Taraborrelli to lead the team designing the vehicle.
    At Lamborghini, Taraborrelli was in charge of chassis and vehicle dynamics working on such models as the Urus, Huracan, Aventador, and the off-road Huracan Sterrato. He also did some work on the Asterion concept car. Earlier this year, there was speculation that Apple is developing an operating system designed just for the Apple Car that would control important functions such as navigation and lane control, Apple Music integration, and air conditioning.
  • Tim Cook comments on Elon Musk, and AR/VR and Apple Car

    Tim Cook comments on Elon Musk, and AR/VR and Apple Car

    In case you missed it, Apple’s CEO gave a 30-minute interview with Kara Swisher, which is available on all major streaming platforms in the form of a podcast.

    The majority of the conversation revolved around data privacy and security, but they also touched on other important topics for Cook and Apple.

    The boss commented on Elon Musk’s claims that Tesla’s boss offered to sell the company to Apple, but Cook ‘wouldn’t even take a meeting with him’. Apple’s head said he hasn’t met up with Musk, but strongly admires what Tesla’s been able to achieve, touching on the company’s consistency over the years.

    He finally shed some light on Apple’s own electric car! He expressed a strong opinion that ‘autonomous cars are robots’. He said there are many things that can be done with autonomous vehicles and ‘we’ll see what Apple does’.

    When Swisher asked if it is going to be ‘a technology within a car’ or a car, he laughed and avoided answering the question. He said: “We love to integrate hardware, software, and services”. This is indeed a very Apple thing to say. He added that he wants to have complete control of all of the three components, so the final product works as seamlessly as other Apple products.

    Kara Swisher mentioned the upcoming WWDC21 conference with a tagline ‘Glow and behold’, and asked if this sentence is supposed to hint at a VR headset. Cook said that he strongly believes in AR, and he’s already seeing use for it even on a smartphone. Therefore, this is definitely part of Apple’s future plans in a big way.

    When he was questioned about the new administration in the US, Apple’s boss stayed very politically correct, and said that he’ll seek involvement in policy, and not politics (if he does at all).

    The interviewer teased him with a question about people being able to vote from their iPhones, and he was positive about it, underlining the fact that most of our data is already on our phones, so using a phone for voting for the next president, might not be so far fetched of a concept.

    Yet, he doesn’t like the idea of moving into politics, but said he wants to advance work on climate change, job creation and ‘retraining’. He is willing to work with whoever is keen on helping Apple to achieve these goals.

    He also spoke about coming out as gay, highlighting the idea of being able to help young people feel safe about being themselves. He said he is going to speak out about discriminatory laws.

  • Apple to build a car by 2024, with ‘next level’ battery

    Apple to build a car by 2024, with ‘next level’ battery

    Apple Inc is moving forward with self-driving car technology and is targeting 2024 to produce a passenger vehicle that could include its own breakthrough battery technology, people familiar with the matter said.

    The iPhone maker’s automotive efforts, known as Project Titan, have proceeded unevenly since 2014 when it first started to design its own vehicle from scratch. At one point, Apple drew back the effort to focus on software and reassessed its goals. Doug Field, an Apple veteran who had worked at Tesla Inc, returned to oversee the project in 2018 and laid off 190 people from the team in 2019.

    Since then, Apple has progressed enough that it now aims to build a vehicle for consumers, two people familiar with the effort said, asking not to be named because Apple’s plans are not public. Apple’s goal of building a personal vehicle for the mass market contrasts with rivals such as Alphabet Inc’s Waymo, which has built robo-taxis to carry passengers for a driverless ride-hailing service.

    Central to Apple’s strategy is a new battery design that could “radically” reduce the cost of batteries and increase the vehicle’s range, according to a third person who has seen Apple’s battery design.

    Apple declined to comment on its plans or future products.

    Making a vehicle represents a supply chain challenge even for Apple, a company with deep pockets that makes hundreds of millions of electronics products each year with parts from around the world, but has never made a car. It took Elon Musk’s Tesla 17 years before it finally turned a sustained profit making cars.

    “If there is one company on the planet that has the resources to do that, it’s probably Apple. But at the same time, it’s not a cellphone,” said a person who worked on Project Titan.

    It remains unclear who would assemble an Apple-branded car, but sources have said they expect the company to rely on a manufacturing partner to build vehicles. And there is still a chance Apple will decide to reduce the scope of its efforts to an autonomous driving system that would be integrated with a car made by a traditional automaker, rather than the iPhone maker selling an Apple-branded car, one of the people added.

    Two people with knowledge of Apple’s plans warned pandemic-related delays could push the start of production into 2025 or beyond.

    Shares of Tesla ended 6.5% lower on Monday after their debut in the S&P 500 on Monday. Apple shares ended 1.24% higher after the news.

    Apple has decided to tap outside partners for elements of the system, including lidar sensors, which help self-driving cars get a three-dimensional view of the road, two people familiar with the company’s plans said.

    Apple’s car might feature multiple lidar sensors for scanning different distances, another person said. Some sensors could be derived from Apple’s internally developed lidar units, that person said. Apple’s iPhone 12 Pro and iPad Pro models released this year both feature lidar sensors.

    Apple had held talks with potential lidar suppliers, but it was also examining building its own sensor.

    As for the car’s battery, Apple plans to use a unique “monocell” design that bulks up the individual cells in the battery and frees up space inside the battery pack by eliminating pouches and modules that hold battery materials, one of the people said.

    Apple’s design means that more active material can be packed inside the battery, giving the car a potentially longer range. Apple is also examining a chemistry for the battery called LFP, or lithium iron phosphate, the person said, which is inherently less likely to overheat and is thus safer than other types of lithium-ion batteries.

    ”It’s next level,” the person said of Apple’s battery technology. “Like the first time you saw the iPhone.”

    Apple had previously engaged Magna International Inc in talks about manufacturing a car, but the talks petered out as Apple’s plans became unclear, a person familiar with those previous efforts said. Magna did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    To turn a profit, automotive contract manufacturers often ask for volumes that could pose a challenge even to Apple, which would be a newcomer to the automotive market.

    “In order to have a viable assembly plant, you need 100,000 vehicles annually, with more volume to come,” the person said.

    Some Apple investors reacted to the Reuters report on the company’s plans with caution. Trip Miller, managing partner at Apple investor Gullane Capital Partners, said it could be tough for Apple to produce large volumes of cars out of the gate.

    “It would seem to me that if Apple develops some advanced operating system or battery technology, it would be best utilized in a partnership with an existing manufacturer under license,” Miller said. “As we see with Tesla and the legacy auto companies, having a very complex manufacturing network around the globe doesn’t happen overnight.”

    Hal Eddins, chief economist at Apple shareholder Capital Investment Counsel, said Apple has a history of higher margins than most automakers.

    “My initial reaction as a shareholder is, huh?” Eddins said. “Still don’t really see the appeal of the car business, but Apple may be eyeing another angle than what I’m seeing.”

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