Tech giant, Apple has said that it plans to lay off 190 employees in its self-driving car program, Project Titan. The company informed this in a state filing to state regulators that it plans to lay off employees from its facilities in Santa Clara County in the city of Cupertino, California on April 16.
A spokesman from the company confirmed that the layoff will happen in the self-driving car program. Previously the iPhone manufacturer reflected an interest in self-driving cars but never revealed the technologies its working upon and how much will be its contribution in the development of the car apart from third party vendors.
Among said that the laid-off workforce includes 24 software engineers, including a machine learning engineer as well as 40 hardware engineers. The layoffs appear to be the first major jolt for Project Titan under Doug Field, who made its re-entry to Apple as VP, Special Projects.
Apple is working on the car project on a “need-to-know” basis involving about 5000 of Apple’s 140,000 full-time workers. About 1200 of the 5000 workforce operate as core employees which are directly involved with the development of the project.
