After just over a year at Apple, former Mercedes R&D chief Johann Jungwirth left the company earlier this month to join Volkswagen AG as the new ‘Head of Digital Transformation’. Even though his official title at Apple was “Director of Mac Systems Engineering”, the executive was rumored to be working on the company’s electric car codenamed “Project Titan” due to his extensive automotive background and the timing of the hire, which was followed by several other engineering hires with experience in the auto industry. Jungwirth is joining Volkswagen amid the “DieselGate” scandal which is pushing the company to try to reinvent itself.
From his LinkedIn profile:
If Jungwirth was indeed working on “Project Titan”, his leaving isn’t likely to make the team short-staffed considering recent reports asserting that Apple tripled the size of the development team by adding 1,200 employees to the program.
When working at Mercedes, Jungwirth was leading the company’s “connected car” effort. Apple recently hired another engineer with a similar experience in fleet management of connected cars and digital license plates.
Mark Gurman contributed to this report.
