Apple hires another Tesla employee, Andrew Kim, the designer famous for re-imagining Microsoft's brand and who worked on Hololens and Windows 10 UI
The hire renews speculation of an Apple-designed car — Andrew Kim, the designer who first rose to prominence with a fan-made reimagining …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's car effort has been assembled almost entirely through talent raids rather than announced products: the company pulled in the head of Mercedes-Benz R&D for a secret research lab in 2015, hired former Tesla VP of Vehicle Engineering Chris Porritt for "special projects", and years later added Lamborghini's chassis chief Luigi Taraborrelli for its self-driving electric car program.
Andrew Kim extends that pattern into design rather than engineering — a hire whose Tesla stint and Microsoft background on HoloLens and Windows 10 UI fits both a vehicle interface role and the broader Apple-designed-car narrative the coverage keeps circling back to.
First-order effects
- Apple gains a senior designer with direct Tesla and mixed-reality UI experience, deepening the bench behind its long-running electric vehicle project.
- The hire immediately revives public speculation that Apple is still actively designing a car, keeping the unannounced program in the news cycle without any product disclosure.
Second-order effects
- Tesla continues to be the primary talent pool Apple draws from — following the earlier Porritt and engineer hires — putting pressure on Tesla to retain design and engineering staff against a rival that can offer its own hardware-software platform.
- Legacy automakers like Mercedes-Benz and Lamborghini, already sources of Apple's automotive leadership, face the same poaching dynamic at the executive level.
Third-order effects
- If the hiring pattern holds, Apple's vehicle program is being structured as an in-house build assembled from competitors' specialists rather than a partnership — a model that treats automotive talent as the scarce input.
- Sustained cross-industry poaching points toward a structural contest between tech companies and carmakers over people who can bridge vehicle engineering and consumer-grade interface design.
The trend: Big Tech car programs are being quietly assembled through a decade-long poaching pipeline running from Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, and Lamborghini into Apple's ranks.