Leading Tesla engineer moves to secret Apple car project

One of Tesla’s leading engineers has rejoined Apple to work on its top-secret motoring project.

Doug Field, who left the Cupertino-based tech giant five years ago to become Tesla’s senior vice-president of engineering, moved back to Apple last month as part of the company’s “Project Titan” team, The Daily Telegraph reports.

Apple has said very little about its plans to enter the car industry, but the Telegraph says the company’s motoring division is working on “electric car technologies” that could be sold to carmakers, rather than developing its own driverless vehicles.

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Before moving back to Apple, Field was put in charge of ramping up production of Tesla’s Model 3, its first mass-produced budget EV, says the Financial Times.

But the electric car company’s chief executive Elon Musk took over Field’s role in April as part of a management reshuffle following a number of missed production deadlines, the FT adds.

John Gruber, a tech industry analyst, wrote on his blog Daring Fireball that fans shouldn’t “read too much into any single hire” as employees move between the two companies frequently.

However, he claims that Field’s re-hiring is particularly noteworthy “because it suggests to me that Apple still has an interest in making actual vehicles”, countering reports that Apple has “scaled back the project”.

Neither Tesla nor Musk have commented on the move, but remarks made by the South Africa-born billionaire three years ago stained the relationship between Tesla and Apple.

In 2015, Musk told German newspaper Handelsblatt that he “jokingly” called Apple a “Tesla graveyard”, as it reportedly hired people that Musk’s company had fired.

“If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I’m not kidding,” he said.

Musk later apologised on Twitter and said he was “glad” Apple was investing in electric vehicles.