Apple appears to be refocusing on its car project, hiring Ulrich Kranz, a former senior executive at BMW, to work on the project.
Kranz spent thirty years at BMW, where he worked in the company’s Mini division, and in teams that developed sports vehicles and SUVs. He headed up Project I, which developed the electric i3 compact and the plug-in hybrid i8 sports car.
After leaving BMW in 2016, he became CFO at electric vehicle startup Faraday Future, then left to co-found clean-energy vehicle start up Canoo.
Apple first attempted to develop an electric vehicle in 2014, but shelved this in 2016, focusing instead on poaching key Tesla executives.
Reports leaked in January that John Giannandrea, senior vice president of machine learning and artificial intelligence, was assembling a team to work on a self-driving electric vehicle, but the results of this weren’t likely to be seen for at least half a decade.
