There seems to be no end to it: bumble bees at the Apple Car team. Following the departure of Doug Field from the Apple Car team, another senior manager has left. Although that in itself is no longer a surprise, it is a special situation. With the departure of Joe Bass, almost all the managers who were still there a year ago have left.
Joe Bass is leaving Apple Car
You probably have the name Joe Bass never seen before. It is therefore one of the lesser known names that was still active at the top of Project Titan, as the car project is also called. His position was officially Lead Engineering Program Manager, Autonomous Systems, where he worked “in the Apple Special Project group on autonomous technologies”. He left there last December and has been working on mixed reality technologies at Meta since this month. Apple has also been working on a mixed reality headset for years, according to sources.
Idle at Apple Car
In 2021, several managers left the Apple Car project, such as Dave Scott, Jaime Waydo and Benjamin Lyon. As mentioned earlier, Doug Field, who was in charge of the project, left the team last September. Since then, Kevin Lynch has been at the helm, who you may know as the boss of watchOS and the Apple keynotes.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman notes that with Joe Bass leaving, nearly everyone at the top of the team who worked there a year ago has now left. Fortunately, that does not mean that no one is working on Apple's car anymore, because there are still countless engineers employed at Apple. But the fact is that 2022 will be an important year for Apple, according to several sources. The Apple Car could appear in 2025, but it is still far from certain whether it will actually go on public roads.