Apple Car’s existence confirmed… by Airbnb

It’s an open secret in Silicon Valley that Apple spent years trying to make an electric and/or self-driving car, before eventually giving up and focusing on related fields. But while the evidence for the existence of Project Titan is widespread and persuasive, it’s never been officially confirmed. Until now.

As spotted by TechRadar, the secret was blown last week by none other than… Airbnb. And if that sounds strange, allow me to explain.

Airbnb just hired a chief technology officer, and chose for the role a former Apple employee: Ahmad Al-Dahle. In publicly available social media Al-Dahle keeps details to a minimum when discussing what he did at Apple Park, referring from 2014-2021 only to “autonomous systems software & algorithm development.” Partly this may be simply the discretion of a man who doesn’t want to burn any bridges, but Apple is also likely to have required him to sign an NDA.

However, Airbnb is far less coy in its announcement of Al-Dahle’s new role at the company. In a post that’s still live at time of writing, co-founder Brian Chesky hypes up the CTO at some length, including the following lines (with my italics) referring to life at Cupertino:

“At Apple, Ahmad worked on the frontier of technology. He was one of the core technologists behind the iPhone’s display and multitouch systems. He later worked in Apple’s core technology platform group, shipping major features in nearly a dozen devices, including the first Apple Watch. In 2014, Ahmad created and led Apple’s autonomous technology group, responsible for developing the core AI systems for the company’s self-driving car project.”

Chesky (or the employee who wrote the post for him, if it was ghost-written) is unlikely to have signed an Apple NDA, and it’s good for morale to be able to explain exactly why the new CTO is a big deal in the tech world. Still, it will be interesting to see if the post stays up. Even if the secret wasn’t much of a secret in the first place.