Tesla acquires Apple head engineer to develop autopilot software

Alongside recent step in restyling its car’s interior layout, Tesla is looking forward to further develop its autopilot feature by acquiring an Apple engineer.

The American marque welcomes Chris Lattner as vice president of Autopilot Software. His decade-long work on Apple involved the creation of Swift, which is the programming language for building apps on Apple devices. 

Before Apple, Lattner was lead author of the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, an open source umbrella project that is said to be widely used in commercial products and academic research today. 

We are very excited that Chris is joining Tesla to lead our Autopilot engineering team and accelerate the future of autonomous driving,” Tesla said on an official statement.

Tesla’s acquisition of Lattner could mean that the American automaker intends to further beef up its autopilot tech. Moreover, Lattner’s know-how and experience in Apple could give Tesla a new technological knowledge. Afterall, Apple is working on its own electric car under the name Project Titan. It was reported that the tech giant employed 1,000 people to work on the project.