Tesla keeps hiring more ex-Apple employees to help with autonomous car design

By Lulu Chang Published January 11, 2017

Tesla is starting to look a lot like Apple — not in its products, per se, but rather in its team.

Continuing its trend of hiring former Apple employees, Tesla has hired a new vice president for its Autopilot efforts. Chris Lattner is the latest to jump ship from Apple and his departure marks the end of an 11-year career at the Cupertino-based tech firm. During this time, Lattner was key in creating Swift, the company’s programming language that can be used to build apps for MacOS, iOS, and more.

In a blog post announcing the addition of Lattner to the team, the company noted that his new role would be to “lead our Autopilot engineering team and accelerate the future of autonomous driving.” The addition of Lattner to the team ought to help Tesla significantly in its quest to form fully self-driving cars, as CEO Elon Musk has noted that he’d like to have an autonomous vehicle make a coast-to-coast test drive by the end of 2017.

But Lattner isn’t the only ex-Apple guy to be switching allegiances. Matt Casebolt, formerly a director of product design at Apple who worked on the Mac Pro and the new MacBook is also a new addition to the Tesla team. Based on his LinkedIn profile, he began serving as Tesla’s director of engineering for closures and mechanisms in December.

Apple's Mac Pro, Touch Bar MacBook and original Air designer, Matt Casebolt, will now be designing Teslas https://t.co/N71takpJI5 pic.twitter.com/Jm1UHGXf5H

— 9to5Mac (@9to5mac) January 11, 2017

Previously, Musk has called Apple “the Tesla graveyard” as it seems that the electronics company has a penchant for hiring former employees of the car company. But clearly, there is a two-way street between the two companies, one that is benefiting Tesla quite a bit for the time being.

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