Apple’s Former Chief Designer, Sir Jony Ive, Actively Involved With Project Titan

In an explosive and detailed exclusive by the Information, it has been revealed that Apple’s fabled Project Titan — which is the code name for the Apple Car project is still hobbled by the distant leadership of Tim Cook and scepticism of software chief Craig Federighi who is not directly involved in the project. In fact, interestingly, the report states that Apple’s former chief designer Sir Jonathan Ive is still actively involved with the project through his design firm LoveForm which does consulting services for Apple.

Ive is perhaps the most celebrated industrial designer on the planet having been credited with Apple’s revival as his team was the brains behind the design of the iPod, the iMac, the iPhone, the iPad and even the Apple Watch. His partnership with Apple’s late founder Steve Jobs was legendary but his role in the company dwindled despite being elevated to Chief Design Officer when Tim Cook took over the reigns after the passing of jobs 11 years ago.

Ive had been disillusioned by Cook’s distant leadership and left Apple in June 2019 to found LoveForm. Apple at the time said he would continue to be part of its projects via LoveForm in a consulting role and it seems so this is true with the Apple Car Project. That being said, many of Apple’s products have been said to have suffered in the 2010s due to his design motif which was not tempered after the passing of Jobs.

Products like the MacBook line, the Mac Pro, and even the iPhone till 2019 over-indexed form over function. But Ive is known to be a car nut and is the owner of many classic cars and is lending his expertise to the design team at Apple. Apple wants to mass-produce a fully autonomous car which is internally codenamed M101. Ive is advising the team that is developing a prototype to not disguise the self-driving elements of the vehicle but rather wants them to “lean into the weirdness” of the car’s design and not hide the sensors.

It seems the car would resemble a Volkswagen Beetle with a curved ceiling with four seats leaning inwards with no steering wheel. The designers at Apple are also experimenting with a truck compartment that automatically raises and lowers to give owners easier access to storage space. The team is also developing screens that rise from behind the seats and lower when they are not in use. This design would also allow owners to lie flat and sleep in the car.

Apple hopes to get exemptions from the NHTSA to remove the steering wheel and brakes and intends to fully depend on self-driving technology. But full self-driving technology seems to at the heart of Apple’s problems having been previously described as the mother of all AI problems by Tim Cook.

Tim Cook according to the report doesn’t actively oversee the project and rarely visits the offices of the Project Titan team in Santa Clara. Many people in the report noted that the project suffers from the lack of a singular figure that could drive the project forward. In fact, many executives have come and left the project like machine learning expert Ian Goodfellow who left Apple earlier this year. Last year it lost Doug Field who ran the project to Ford where he became the chief of technology. Field himself replaced an Apple veteran from the era of Steve Jobs Bob Mansfield who was brought out of retirement to get the project back on track.

Now the project is being run by Apple Watch software chief Kevin Lynch with his teams reporting to Apple’s AI SVP John Giannandrea. Apple’s teams even have created well-produced demo videos of their mule Lexus cars running their self-driving tech for Tim Cook to access the progress. These cars did fine while the videos were being shot but the cars struggled to navigate the streets in Silicon Valley near its headquarters without maps and hit the curbs. The cars also struggled with lane-keeping while crossing intersections.

Then in 2022, there was an incident where a test car nearly hit a jogger at 25 km/h as the car’s self-driving system identified the jogger as a stationary object and finally realised it was a moving pedestrian. But even with corrected identification the car only minutely adjusted its path and the backup human driver had to slam the brakes manually to avoid a collision.

The report states that Apple has resolved the issue after it grounded its fleet and added the crosswalk to its maps database.