Tesla appoints ex-Apple head developer to lead Autopilot software

Tesla Motors has hired ex-Apple head developer Chris Lattner to be its new vice president of Autopilot software.

Lattner comes to Tesla after 11 years at Apple where he was primarily responsible for creating Swift, the programming language for building apps on Apple platforms and one of the fastest growing languages for doing so on Linux. Prior to Apple, Chris was the lead author of the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, an open source umbrella project that is widely used in commercial products and academic research today.

Lattner’s new team at Tesla will be responsible for developing software to work with full autonomy hardware, which consists of eight surround cameras, 12 ultrasonic sensors and a forward-facing radar.

Once new software is produced, Tesla can supply existing models with new code via over-the-air updates. The plan is to eventually enable all cars running its latest hardware with more advanced driverless functions and to ‘accelerate the future of autonomous driving’.

Commenting on Lattner’s appointment, Tesla said in an official statement, “As Chris joins Tesla, we would like to give a special thanks to Jinnah Hosein, SpaceX’s Vice President of Software, who has been serving a dual role as the interim Vice President of Tesla Autopilot Software and will now be heading back to SpaceX full-time. We would like to thank Jinnah for the efforts needed to achieve excellence in both roles, David Nister, our Vice President of Autopilot Vision, and the team for their exceptional work in advancing Autopilot. We are very excited that Chris is joining Tesla to lead our Autopilot engineering team and accelerate the future of autonomous driving.”

Last week, Tesla’s Gigafactory, located in Nevada, began producing battery cells. The firm has been preparing to significantly ramp up production following the launches of its Model X and Model 3.