Apple has poached one of Lamborghini’s highest ranking and longest serving engineers to work on its EV project.
Luigi Taraborrelli had worked at Lamborghini for 20 years, rising to become the firm’s head of chassis and vehicle dynamics, where he helped shape the feel of cars like the Huracan and Aventador supercars and the Urus SUV.
Taraborrelli’s Linkedin profile also says his team oversaw Lamborghini’s Nürburgring record attempts, worked on Lamborghini’s PHEV projects, and managed the development of small-series cars like the upcoming Huracan-based Sterrato, Centenario, and Veneno, plus show cars including the Asterion.
But that same Linkedin profile now lists Taraborrelli’s location as “San Francisco Bay Area”, which ties in with Bloomberg’s report that the Italian engineer has swapped continents to join the grown ranks of auto engineers who have ditched legacy brands to work on Apple’s still-secret EV, codenamed “Project Titan”. It’s possible that Luigi Taraborrelli came onto Apple’s radar when the Silicon Valley tech firm teamed up with Lamborghini on an augmented reality project that allowed customers (and dreamers) to preview the Hurcan EVO Spyder.
Earlier this year Apple swooped for Desi Ujkashevic, a three-decade Ford veteran who had most recently served as Global Director of Automotive Safety Engineering, a position that encompassed autonomous vehicle safety systems. Ujkashevic’s expertise will be pivotal to the success of the project, which allegedly will offer Level 4 (or even Level 5) autonomous capability, meaning it doesn’t require human control, though Apple is apparently prepared to launch the vehicle with less advanced semi-autonomous systems if the self-driving tech isn’t ready in time.
And last year Apple hired former BMW EV executive, Ulrich Kranz, who joined a staff Bloomberg says now includes “hundreds” of former engineers from Tesla, Rivian, Volvo, and Mercedes-Benz, plus senior design execs from Tesla, McLaren, Porsche, and Aston Martin.