Self-driving business encounters resistance again, lays off 190 employees

Recently, Apple revealed in an email to a department in California that Apple’s autonomous driving department has a new layoff plan. This layoff plan plans to lay off 190 Apple employees.

According to the document, the layoffs include 38 engineering project managers, 33 hardware engineers, 31 product design engineers and 22 software engineers, among other positions. Mainly engineers. The laid off employees belong to the autonomous driving department. It can be seen that Apple must have encountered a lot of resistance in this field!

It is reported that these laid-off employees will be laid off in April, and others will be transferred to other parts of the company. Apple said this is part of the company's reorganization and the team will focus on key areas in 2019.

As for the reason for the large-scale layoffs, due to the decline in iPhone sales, Apple's revenue has dropped, which has caused Apple's internal dilemma. In addition, Apple's self-driving car test platform has performed too poorly on public roads. Its self-driving cars have been forced to exit self-driving mode and hand over control to human drivers most frequently.

In addition, Apple tested a total of 79,745 miles in one year, which is far lower than Waymo and Cruise, but the system error rate is much higher than its competitors. For a combination of reasons, Apple had to make plans for large-scale layoffs.

Actually, this is not the first round of layoffs for the team. Apple laid off a lot of people in 2016 as it shifted from developing a fully functional self-driving car to just developing the underlying platform.

Despite the layoffs, Apple said it still sees autonomous driving systems as a huge opportunity in the future.