Hyundai, Kia deny Apple car talks, send shares tumbling

SEOUL - South Korean automaker Hyundai and its affiliate Kia on Monday denied news reports they were in talks with Apple for a joint project to make autonomous vehicles, sending their shares tumbling.

The announcement came about a month after the country's cable broadcaster Korea Economic TV said the iPhone maker had approached Hyundai to discuss a potential partnership to develop electric vehicles and batteries for them, sending the car maker's shares soaring.

Reports last week suggested they could produce cars in the US state of Georgia.

But on Monday Hyundai and Kia said in regulatory filings they were "not discussing autonomous electric car development with Apple".

Both automakers added that they had talked with multiple firms about such projects, but no decision had been made.

Hyundai said those talks were in their "early stages".

Kia shares slumped 14.98 percent at the close in Seoul on Monday, while Hyundai fell 6.21 percent.

Consumer interest in eco-friendly vehicles has mounted in recent years with Tesla largely taking the lead in the sector.

Apple's Project Titan is devoted to self-driving technology but the firm is known for being ultra-secretive about its business.

Hyundai, South Korea's biggest automaker, has already rolled out fully electric cars, including the Ioniq and the Kona Electric, as it seeks to win a slice of the growing market.

But Apple has never acknowledged talks with Hyundai, despite several news reports claiming they were close to a deal.

Agence France-Presse

Apple self-driving car layoffs give hints to division's direction

Apple Inc said on Wednesday it planned to lay off 190 employees in its self-driving car program, Project Titan, changes that provide a rare window into the automotive technologies the company has been pursuing.

The tech firm said in a filing with state regulators that it planned to lay off people from 8 different Santa Clara County facilities near its Cupertino, California, headquarters, as of April 16. A company spokesman confirmed that the reduction was from the self-driving car program.

While the iPhone maker has acknowledged its interest in self-driving cars in broad terms, it has never detailed precisely which technologies it is working on and whether it seeks to build a whole vehicle or the sensors, computer system and software to control one.

The public documents filed with regulators provide some previously undisclosed clues.

Among those laid off were at least two dozen software engineers, including a machine learning engineer, and 40 hardware engineers, according to a letter sent by Apple to California employment regulators earlier this month.

Some of the positions hint at physical products for consumers: three product design engineers and an ergonomics engineer face layoffs. A machine shop supervisor was among the reductions, though it is unclear how many machinists reported to the supervisor and whether the shop fabricates automotive parts or smaller parts for electronics and sensors.

The layoffs appear to be the first major shake-up of Project Titan under Doug Field, who returned to Apple last year as Vice President of Special Projects after a stint at electric car maker Tesla Inc.

Apple operates the car project on a "need-to-know" basis, with only about 5,000 of Apple's 140,000 full-time workers included, according to court documents in a theft of trade secrets criminal case filed this year against an ex-Apple employee.

About 1,200 of those are "core" employees that are "directly working on the development of the project," according to the complaint, which was unsealed in January.

Despite the headcount changes, the company appears to have ramped up its testing on California roads. In a filing with regulators earlier this month, Apple said it had logged nearly 80,000 miles of testing in its home state in 2018, far surpassing the less than 1,000 miles it had logged the year before.

It was, however, far fewer than Alphabet Inc's Waymo unit, which logged 1.2 million miles in California last year.

source: news.abs-cbn.com