Back in March, Tesla’s VP of Engineering Michael Schwekutsch announced that he will be leaving the company after 3 and a half years, without getting into detail as to why – even so, there seemed to be no hard feelings between the engineer and Tesla.
Schwkutsch was a prominent member of the company at the time – he had worked on setting up the drivetrain production lines at the Gigafactory 1 and has worked in developing the “leading edge Drive Systems like the one of the Tesla Roadster II and Tesla Semi / Tesla Truck”, according to his LinkedIn profile.
In addition to his Tesla achievements, the engineer has worked for third-party powertrain engineering firms like BorgWarner and GKN Driveline and has managed programs for both the electric and hybrid powertrains of the BMW i8, Porsche 918 Spyder, Fiat 500eV, Volvo XC90, just to name a few.
So it would make sense that he would continue to work for another one of the big names out there, considering his experience. According to Electrek sources, Schwkutsch seems to have joined Apple’s Special Project Group, which happens to include the company’s notoriously secretive Project Titan division.
Titan is Apple’s electric/autonomous vehicle project that people don’t really know a lot about – the company has been careful about keeping it as closed off from the public and the media since its inception and the project has gone through numerous changes through the years.
Schwekutsch would not be the first former Tesla employee to join Apple though: Doug Field is another engineer who used to work for the automotive company and ended up joining Apple back in August 2018, among several others.
With the arrival of Schwekutsch, rumors have started to pop up that Apple’s electric vehicle is about to hit the market soon enough – Schwekutsch, after all, has worked on electric powertrains exclusively for the past 10 years.
Project Titan is fluctuating on and off every few months – it was just in January that Apple announced it was letting go of over 200 staff from the division but was quick to clarify that some of the groups were actually moving to other projects within the company.
By all accounts, the Cupertino giant is playing it safe rather than fast and aims to build its future vehicles from the ground up, which would be a feat in itself, in spite of the ongoing, simmering war of both words and employees between Apple and Tesla.
In 2015, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in an interview to German newspaper Hadelsblatt (via Business Insider) that Apple has “hired people we’ve fired. We always jokingly call Apple the “Tesla Graveyard.” If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I’m not kidding.”
On the other hand, it’s worth noting that Tesla itself has hired around 150 former Apple employees in the past couple of years. Even so, the investment seems more significant for Apple – the company does not yet have the necessary experience in building vehicles, but the top talent they have and continue to hire, will most likely even the odds between Apple and Tesla.
For now, we know next to nothing about the upcoming vehicles, except the fact that they are currently being tested in California but we’re quite curious to see what Apple has come up with and if -or how- their electric cars will change the current market.
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