Apple Hires Yet Another Former Tesla Engineer

According to a report by Reuters, Apple has hired yet another former Tesla engineer to join its growing automated car team.

Reuters has indicated that a LinkedIn profile for Tesla senior engineer Jamie Carlson shows he has left the electric carmaker and has moved over to Apple. At least six others with experience developing self-driving technologies and systems have also joined Apple, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Attempts by Reuters to contact these seven people were all unsuccessful, and Apple declined to comment on the matter.

According to Carlson’s LinkedIn profile, he joined Apple in August in an unnamed position in a special projects group. Up until then, he was an engineer working on Tesla’s Autopilot self-driving car program, and had previously worked on automotive vision systems for Michigan-based supplier Gentex Corp.

A growing number of sources have said that Apple is currently developing a car as well as studying self-driving technology, but it remains unclear whether or not the technology giant is actually designing a fully autonomous vehicle.

However, since January, Apple has hired Megan McClain, a former Volkswagen engineer with expertise in automated driving, as well as Vinay Palakkode, a graduate researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, which is known as a hub of automated driving research. In August, Apple hired Xianqiao Tong, an engineer who developed computer vision software for driver assistance systems at microchip maker Nvidia Corp.

Then there was the report earlier this year from The Wall Street Journal stating Apple hired Paul Furgale, a former deputy director of the Autonomous Systems Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) handle many tasks, including keeping a vehicle in a lane or driving by itself in stop-and-go traffic. ADAS are typically considered to be the essential building blocks for self-driving cars.

Based on information obtained from their LinkedIn profiles, other Apple hires since September 2014 with similar experience have worked at automakers BMW, Volkswagen and Ford, automotive suppliers Delphi Automotive, Robert Bosch GmbH and TRW, now a part of ZF Friedrichshafen. Those who were hired by Apple last fall include Sanjai Massey, an engineer with experience in developing connected and automated vehicles at Ford and several suppliers, Stefan Weber, a former Bosch engineer with experience in video-based driver assistance systems, and Lech Szumilas, a former Delphi research scientist with expertise in computer vision and object detection.

Additionally, earlier this summer, Apple hired Doug Betts, a seasoned automotive executive with over 20 years of industry experience overseeing all aspects of the manufacturing process, including supply chain logistics and product quality.

Apple may be keeping tight-lipped about its rumored development of a self-driving car, but with all of the aforementioned hires, it doesn’t appear that those rumors are going to die down any time soon.