Apple hires Tesla’s director of Autopilot software
Apple has been incredibly secretive about its efforts to develop a self-driving car, but according to Bloomberg, its latest move is hiring a key personnel from its toughest competition. The tech giant has reportedly hired Christopher “CJ” Moore, who’s been the director for Tesla’s Autopilot Software since 2019 and who’s been with the company since 2014. While Moore has yet to update his LinkedIn page, Bloomberg says he will also work on software at Apple and will report to Stuart Bowers. Like Moore, Bowers worked as Tesla’s head of Autopilot unit until he left in 2019.
Back in May, Moore was one of the employees who told the California DMV that Elon Musk exaggerated the automaker’s full self-driving timeline. In a DMV conference call, he said Musk’s statements that Level 5 automated driving is coming soon didn’t “match engineering reality.” Musk has been saying that Tesla’s technology will soon be able to operate with zero human intervention. At the moment, it’s still only capable of Level 2 self-driving, which still requires drivers to keep their hands on the wheel. Moore was called as a witness in a lawsuit over the death of a man in a 2019 Autopilot crash in Florida. The documents for that lawsuit revealed in early October that Moore had already left Tesla.
Moore and Bowers are just two of the former Tesla employees Apple had hired for its car division. Other hires include Michael Schwekutsch, who used to be Tesla’s VP of Engineering and who worked on drive trains, and Steve MacManus, who was also a Tesla VP of Engineering.
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