CJ Moore, a former Autopilot software engineer for Tesla Inc., has left Apple’s secretive autonomous-vehicle project after just seven months.
Moore’s latest employer is Luminar, a company that makes lidar. Lidar is a technology used by most companies working on autonomous-driving systems — except Tesla, which uses only cameras for its Full Self-Driving feature and has labeled lidar a “crutch.”
Moore’s departure from Apple signals another shake-up for Project Titan, the tech company’s meandering effort to develop an autonomous vehicle.
Meanwhile, Luminar has managed to hire top talent from around the tech and auto industries; it also added Taner Ozcelik, the founder of Nvidia’s automotive business, last week.
“We’re attracting the best leaders in the world in their fields to execute our vision and deliver on the future of transportation,” Luminar CEO Austin Russell said in a statement.
Russell has dubbed himself the “chief autonomous industry skeptic” and criticized Tesla CEO Elon Musk for overstating the capability of its software by naming it “Full Self-Driving.” Moore also has pushed back against Musk’s public claims, saying that an assertion that Teslas would be fully autonomous by the end of 2021 “does not match engineering reality,” according to a memo from the California Department of Motor Vehicles.