A secret team of NASA veterans and robotics experts recruited by Apple to lead its self-driving car project has had its cover blown by what appears to be a simple bureaucratic snafu.
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A bureaucratic mistake has revealed Apple’s secret team of self-driving car experts (AAPL, GOOG, GOOGL)
Apple has quietly assembled a secret team of artificial intelligence geniuses to take on Waymo and Uber in driverless cars.
Apple Director of AI Ruslan Salakhutdinov
The filing with the California Department of Motor Vehicles provided the first public details about Apple's efforts testing self-driving cars, including brief descriptions of the car's "automated system" and a walk-through of the training program for test vehicle operators.
Apple has long sought to maintain a tight level of secrecy around the products under development in its labs and has never publicly acknowledged that it is working on self-driving car. obtained permits to test self-driving cars
As the Wall Street Journal notes, the fact that Apple is enlisting these senior-level engineers and PhDs to operate their cars could indicate that the program is still in its early stages. Historically, self-driving car programs like Google spin-out Waymo's only involve senior staff in day-to-day testing until the software is considered stable enough that others can take over.
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Apple's work in the automotive world is an open secret in the industry, but the company remains tight-lipped about its progress.
"It's going to be Christmas Eve for a while," Apple CEO Tim Cook said in February 2016, indicating that the company wasn't yet ready to divulge its plans.
Apple has what appears to be a mostly separate organization of 1,000 employees working on what it calls "Project Titan" in Sunnyvale, California and other satellite offices. When the project was first revealed in 2015, Apple was planning to build an electric car, with self-driving planned as a later feature.
Last year, the project hit some snags, though, and Apple was forced to bring on Bob Mansfield, a respected engineer, to cut back the scope of the project and set new goals, according to reporting from Bloomberg. Apple is believed be be primarily working on autonomous software, instead of a full electric car, but the project is still shrouded in secrecy.
Apple is expected to assess the progress it has made on self-driving cars at the end of this year, according to Bloomberg.
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