Apple to lay off 190 workers from self-driving car project

Apple is axeing 190 workers from its self-driving car division.

A letter to the California Employment Development Department says the staff will be laid off from eight sites in Santa Clara and Sunnyvale, near the firm’s Cupertino headquarters, on April 16. Software and hardware engineers will go, along with machinists and product designers.

Little is known about Apple’s autonomous car development, named Project Titan. It’s reportedly operated on a ‘need-to-know’ basis, with only around 5,000 of Apple’s workers involved and some 1,200 directly employed on the project.

The new shake-up comes after Apple hired Tesla’s former vice-president of engineering, Doug Field, to head up the project. Field originally worked at Apple but left in 2013 to work for the electric car giant.

Project Titan has already gone through plenty of change. Employees were laid off in 2016 when Apple announced it had ditched plans to develop a fully fledged autonomous vehicle – instead focusing on the underlying platform, software and self-driving hardware.

It coincides with a drop in iPhone sales – a rare occurrence. Revenue from the smartphone dropped by 15 per cent in the last three months of 2018, blamed primarily on weak sales in China as well as a battery replacement programme that may have prompted people to hold on to their devices rather than buy new ones.

An Apple spokesperson confirmed the lay-offs to business news channel CNBC, saying: “We have an incredibly talented team working on autonomous systems and associated technologies at Apple.

“As the team focus their work on several key areas for 2019, some groups are being moved to projects in other parts of the company, where they will support machine learning and other initiatives, across all of Apple.

“We continue to believe there is a huge opportunity with autonomous systems, that Apple has unique capabilities to contribute, and that this is the most ambitious machine-learning project ever.”