Apple Watch Chief Kevin Lynch Now Leading Apple Car Efforts

Apple VP of technology Kevin Lynch is taking over the Apple Car project and will be replacing Doug Field, who is moving to Ford, reports Bloomberg.

Apple car wheel icon feature blue
Lynch first joined the Apple Car team in July, with reports suggesting he had been called on to help lead Apple Car development. Now that Field has left the company, Lynch will be taking over his role and will be in charge of the Apple Car. Lynch will oversee hardware engineering and work on self-driving car sensors.

Known for his work on the Apple Watch, Lynch has been at Apple since 2013, and before that, he worked at Adobe and helped create Adobe's Creative Cloud platform. In addition to working on the Apple Car, Lynch is expected to continue to be involved with the Apple Watch and Apple's health initiatives.

Apple Car leadership has undergone several changes over the course of the last several years, which has caused development issues and internal strife. According to Bloomberg, the departure of former Apple Car leader Doug Field has been seen as a sign that the Apple Car isn't coming in the near future, with product development still in the early stages.

The choice of Lynch to head the car project indicates much of the company's focus still remains on underlying software and self-driving technology - rather than the vehicle's physical mechanics. Lynch has been a software executive for decades, not someone who oversees hardware teams. He's also never worked at a car company.

Ford on Tuesday announced that it hired Field to work on AI, software, and hardware projects. Field had been at Apple since 2018, and prior to that, he worked at Tesla and oversaw the production of the Model 3.

Rumors have suggested that we're not going to see an Apple Car until the mid to late 2020s at the earliest, and it's not clear how the most recent leadership changes might impact that launch timeline.

Top Rated Comments

RoboCop001 Avatar
34 months ago
Steering wheel is a giant digital crown ?
Score: 32 Votes (Like | Disagree)
alexandr Avatar
34 months ago
now it will launch on time!
Score: 27 Votes (Like | Disagree)
JoshuaBru Avatar
34 months ago
I enjoy reading about the Apple car about as much as I like reading about Ted Lasso
Score: 26 Votes (Like | Disagree)
now i see it Avatar
34 months ago
Rumors have it that we're going to continue hearing rumors about the iCar for the next 12 years
Score: 21 Votes (Like | Disagree)
jonnyb098 Avatar
34 months ago
If apples software in recent years is any indication……they can keep this damn thing in a lab indefinitely.
Imagine an apple car that won’t go over 25MPH due to a memory leak.

To top it off this thing would no doubt start at $49,999 for the base model. If you want a steering wheel add another $500. Spare tire? Yeah that’ll be another $1000. More storage capacity to carry groceries? That’s gonna cost ya too!
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)
jz0309 Avatar
34 months ago
let's see how long he lasts ...
MR, would it be possible to create a story of the timeline of Apple car timeline? I realize it would be a mega project ...
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Popular Stories

maxresdefault

Apple Announces 'Let Loose' Event on May 7 Amid Rumors of New iPads

Tuesday April 23, 2024 7:11 am PDT by
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple Vision Pro Dual Loop Band Orange Feature 2

Apple Cuts Vision Pro Shipments as Demand Falls 'Sharply Beyond Expectations'

Tuesday April 23, 2024 9:44 am PDT by
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple Silicon AI Optimized Feature Siri

Apple Releases Open Source AI Models That Run On-Device

Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
iPad And Calculator App Feature

Apple Finally Plans to Release a Calculator App for iPad Later This Year

Tuesday April 23, 2024 9:08 am PDT by
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
iOS 17 All New Features Thumb

iOS 17.5 Will Add These New Features to Your iPhone

Sunday April 21, 2024 3:00 am PDT by
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...