This is bad news for the traditional automobile industry. Apple’s huge automobile business group has officially surfaced.
Doug Field, the former No. 3 person at Tesla and the senior vice president responsible for vehicle R&D and manufacturing of the entire Tesla company, officially updated his LinkedIn identity information and did not disappoint everyone. The title is the vice president of Apple's Special Projects Group (hereinafter referred to as SPG).
If you search on LinkedIn, Apple SPG has nearly 1,200 employees, of which more than 300 are from Tesla and more than 170 are from Ford. Of course, this is only a portion of the total number of employees in Apple’s automotive business group.
There is no doubt that SPG is the Apple Automotive Business Group.
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For a long time before this, managers from automobile companies who joined Apple did not dare to openly indicate their job description as Apple SPG on their LinkedIn.
For example, Johann Jungwirth, the current chief digital officer of the Volkswagen Group, used his disguised identity as the hardware engineering director of Apple Mac when working at Apple; Aindrea Campbell, a Ford body structure and stamping expert, had an even more ridiculous identity, actually being the director of iPad operations.
Chris Gerdes, a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University, once complained: "Oh my God, if you find that any automotive-related executive in Silicon Valley suddenly leaves and their whereabouts are unknown, they probably went to Apple."
However, the era of such hiding is over.
Because Doug Field has clearly marked his identity as the vice president of Apple SPG, it means that the Apple car project will officially enter the stage of history in the form of SPG. Compared with the official debut, it only needs to be marked with an iCar icon.
Prior to this, Jaime Waydo, head of autonomous driving system integration at Google's sister company Waymo, joined Apple and has already been traveling around the world as a senior director of SPG. However, Apple’s self-driving business, Tim Cook, made it public in June 2017, and people were not surprised.