Apple hires a top executive from Ford. Apple’s car project still seems alive.
It has been rumored for a long, long time that the American giant Apple is working on an automotive project. Is it a car or technologies that would be offered to existing manufacturers? It’s hard to say, but in recent years, the Cupertino company has built up a large team of specialists, poaching here and there among industry executives.
Apple hires top Ford executive
Apple today hired a longtime Ford engineer and executive to work on its car project. Bloomberg made this announcement. Desi Ujkashevic had worked for Ford since 1991. Before leaving the company in March, she was Ford’s global director of automotive safety engineering, a very important position.
Her responsibilities included supervising the team of engineers working on vehicle safety for Ford Europe and the global technical design operations division. In his early days at Ford, according to his LinkedIn profile, Desi Ujkashevic worked in vehicle engineering, testing and durability, among other things. She had also worked on various initiatives for electric vehicles and regulatory challenges. In other words, Desi Ujkashevic seems to be typically the kind of profile one might want for an electric vehicle project.
Apple’s car project still seems alive
Apple explained that it began working on an autonomous vehicle in 2015. That being said, this project has suffered from a number of setbacks over the years, in particular due to changes in strategy and reorganizations in its teams. Doug Field, who we learned had left Project Titan, left Apple to join Ford last September. However, this hiring of Desi Ujkashevic is another indication that the Cupertino company is still trying to design its own electric car.
And for what it’s worth, in a recent LinkedIn post, Desi Ujkashevic said she was “can’t wait to get started [sa] new adventure and [elle] hopes to continue contributing to society and advancing technology to make it a better world!”