While Apple hasn’t officially announced an electric car being in the works, “Project Titan” is all but solidified in the minds of the world, especially with as much talent as the company continues to add to its unofficial team.
The engineers that Apple has picked up since last Autumn from Mission Motors and Mission Motorcycles, may have been a driving force for the parent company to confirm that it has ceased operations, and that Mission Motorcycles has been forced to start going through the process of filing for bankruptcy, according to a report published recently byReuters.
Mission Motors, for its part, was founded in 2007. The goal of the company was to create a high-profile, world-class electric motorcycle. That dream was only realized with an early prototype, though, which the company showed off in 2013. According to the report, Mission Motorcycles was frequently hard-pressed for cashflow, though, which is just one of the factors that led many engineers to leave the company and venture over to the Cupertino-based company instead.
According to the report, at least six different engineers left Mission Motors in favor of Apple since last Autumn.
“Mission had a great group of engineers, specifically electric drive expertise,” [former CEO Derek] Kaufman said. “Apple knew that – they wanted it, and they went and got it.”
According to Kaufman, Apple never aimed to acquire Mission Motors as a whole, but instead focused on picking up individual engineers from the overall team. That includes people that were working on battery algorithms for charging and cooling, as well as individuals working on electric drive systems.
This isn’t the first time that it’s been reported that Apple has been picking up talent from other companies towards its own electric car efforts. Just recently the CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, called Apple the “Tesla graveyard” for as many engineers as Apple has brought over from Tesla.
While not official, it was reported earlier in 2015 that Apple’s Project Titan is now a “committed project,” and that the team building the electric car is now permanent, with a ship date targeted for as early as 2019.
[via Reuters]
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