Apple has reportedly hired a senior engineer from the electric car maker, Tesla Motors, as reported by Reuters. The engineer's LinkedIn posting said that he is a part of Apple's team of experts in automated driving.

Jamie Carlson, the said engineer, joins seven other people with experience in the development of self-driving technology and systems. This has fuelled the rumors of Apple working on a self-driving car. Carlson's work with Tesla is about the autopilot self-driving car program.

According to Reuters' sources, Apple has started to develop a car and continues its research on self-driving technology. The report further states that several attempts have been done to reach all eight people, but they declined. Apple also refused to comment.

Carlson joins former Volkswagen engineer, Megan McClain; Carnegie Mellon University researcher, Vinay Palakkode; Nvidia Corporation's Xianqiao Tong; as well as former deputy director of the Autonomous Systems Lab at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Paul Furgale. Last year, Apple also hired former Bosch engineer, Stefan Weber; former Ford engineer, Sanjai Massey and former Delphi research scientist, Lech Szumilas.

The latest hire before Carlson is former Fiat Chrysler global quality leader, Doug Betts. Betts has a lot of experience in the automobile industry, previously working for Nissan and Toyota.

McClain and Palakkode are experts in automated driving while Tong is an engineer who develops vision software for driving assistant systems. Weber has experience in video-based driver assistance systems, Massey in automated vehicles of Ford and Szumalis specializes in computer vision and object detection.

One thing is for sure; the Cupertino-based company is hiring a team with expertise in automobile and self-driving assistant systems.

In a report from Press Examiner, Apple's self-driving vehicle project goes by the name "Project Titan." However, the company has still not released a statement about it. "Project Titan" is said to be lead by a 16-year Apple veteran, Steve Zadesky, as reported by The VAR Guy.

Zadesky joined the company in 1999 to work on the iPod and later the iPhone. Zadesky is rumored to have hired about a thousand people on his team to work on the electric car, which includes the recruitment of the experts mentioned above.

In other auto-related news, Tesla signed a partnership with home rental service, Airbnb, to set up charging stations at different locations due to the high demand by its customers, according to a report from NYC Today. Tesla and Airbnb have started to use the "Be free, Go far" campaign for their partnership.

Related