Tesla announced it has lured in a long-time Apple software veteran, Chris Lattner to give shape to its enhanced Autopilot dreams. Chris has served at Apple for over a decade – 11-years to be precise – and is believed to be the main driving force behind the creation of the Swift programing language that can be used to create an app for Apple devices.
Chris will be taking over from Jinnah Hosein who, besides being the head of software section at SpaceX has also been seeing things at Autopilot on a part-time basis. With Chris now at the helm of affairs at Tesla Autopilot, Hosein will be going back full-time to SpaceX.
Tesla [NASDAQ: TSLA] stocks still closed 0.6 percent lower on the stock market even though the prices continued to be at its highest over a five-month period. Apple [NASDAQ: AAPL] stock, on the other hand, registered a 0.1 percent rise.
Chris’ joining Tesla can still be considered a significant development for the car maker considering the huge software expertise that he brings along. He will have to hit the ground running in his new role given that it will be upon him to make the new enhanced Autopilot to deliver to its full potential.
The new cars leaving Tesla factories come equipped with new and more powerful radar, sensors and cameras all round to make the car better aware of its surroundings. However, the software to make the best use of the new enhanced Autopilot is still being developed. Chris’ joining Tesla is only expected to further add impetus to the efforts.
Interestingly, while Chris will be leading Autopilot efforts at Tesla, Apple itself has scaled down it secretive self-driving car project codenamed Titan. Last reported, Project Titan does not envisage developing a complete self-driving car anymore.
Instead, Apple is believed to be into making the software and hardware package that automakers can use to make their cars autonomous. This, in turn, happens to be the same approach as that of Google with its self-driving car project that right now operates under a separate company named Waymo.