Apple is serious about its first electric vehicle: it hires a former BMW executive

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Apple announced this Friday the hiring of former BMW manager Ulrich Kranz, who will join the team working on the development of the first electric vehicle for the apple-bitten company. Kranz, who after his time at BMW co-founded and directed the electric vehicle startup Canoo, will work on the so-called Titan project under the orders of Doug Field, from Tesla. At BMW, Kranz was also involved in making electric cars.

In addition to this project, in recent times there has been much speculation about the possibility that the iPhone company will also launch fully into the automotive market with its own autonomous vehicle.

In early April, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave the clearest signal to date about the company's interest in autonomous vehicles, noting that an autonomous car is a robot and adding: We'll see that Apple does with driverless transportation.

Cook indicated during his interview on the Sway podcast that autonomous driving itself is, in his opinion, core technology and considered that there are many things that can be done in this field.

And we'll see what Apple does, continued Cook, who when asked if Apple is working on the development of autonomous vehicles, explained that the company investigates many things internally and many of them never see the light of day, although he also added, I'm not saying that it won't come out.

Apple has never officially reported that it is working on the development of autonomous driving vehicles, although information about the company's interest in the sector has periodically appeared for years.

In December 2020, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, the manufacturer of luxury electric vehicles that has an ambitious autonomous driving program, showed his surprise about the information around Apple and its interest in producing self-driving cars.

Musk revealed that when things turned bad for Tesla in the face of difficulties producing the Model 3, he tried to sell the company to Apple for a tenth of its value, but Cook refused to accept a meeting to discuss the offer.