Revealed: The experts Apple hired to build an electric car
In the last few weeks we've heard about a poaching war between Apple and Tesla, a couple hires by Apple from the auto industry, and a whole lot of speculation followed by reports that Apple has a team of hundreds working on an electric vehicle.
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-February 2015 the picture of Apple's car effort has snapped into focus: days after reports that Apple hired the head of Mercedes-Benz R&D for a secret research lab, the WSJ confirmed several hundred employees are designing a minivan-like electric vehicle under former Ford executive Steve Zadesky. This piece names the specific experts behind that push, deepening what was already framed as a poaching war between Apple and Tesla.
The hires matter because they show Apple buying automotive competence rather than building it — and the related coverage shows the strategy running both directions, with Apple also gathering advice from carmakers and suppliers about parts and production methods while its own team grows.
First-order effects
- Apple's secret lab gains named automotive specialists from Mercedes-Benz and Tesla, giving the Titan team — already several hundred strong under Zadesky — credibility in vehicle engineering rather than just consumer electronics.
- Tesla loses engineering staff directly to Apple, turning a potential future competitor into an immediate talent rival.
Second-order effects
- Legacy automakers and suppliers now face a well-funded poacher for their best EV and R&D engineers, forcing defensive compensation and retention moves across Detroit and Stuttgart.
- Carmakers consulting Apple on parts and production are effectively training a company whose stated goal is to compete with them, a tension suppliers will have to price into any deal.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the boundary between consumer-electronics firms and automakers erodes as hardware giants buy their way into vehicles — though the six-year gap between the 2015 Titan reports and Bloomberg's later account of an autonomous car still five to seven years out shows how much harder this transition proved than the hiring spree implied.
- Talent becomes the primary currency of the EV race, with companies like Apple and Tesla competing for the same pool of automotive engineers before either ships a product.
The trend: Consumer-electronics companies are entering the auto industry by acquiring automotive engineering talent outright, making engineer poaching the opening move of the EV era.