Former Tesla “Autopilot” lead now leaves Apple’s Project Titan for a LiDAR company — Yet another signal the industry is collapsing

Michael DeKort
3 min readMay 26, 2022

Article reference — Apple Car Director Leaves the Company After Seven Months

(Former Tesla Autopilot director Christopher “CJ” Moore is now a former Apple car director as well.) — https://jalopnik.com/apple-car-director-leaves-the-company-after-seven-month-1848977927

CJ Moore was the software lead for Tesla’s “Autopilot”. Then he left to go to head Apple’s autonomy efforts at Project Titan. Now he is head of software at Luminar, a LIDAR company. What does this tell us? The autonomous vehicle industry’s collapse is moving forward. (For those of you who pint to Waymo, Cruise, Argo, Gatik etc being “driverless” now, I say that’s nonsense. See my article below.) Not only is Apple doomed but someone with this cache is NOT working for an AV maker, but LiDAR company. Yes, you can Deep Learn LiDAR point clouds. But that’s a fraction of making an AV. (Deep Learning, like its parent General Learning, is nowhere near robust enough for this domain yet. So . . these folks aren’t going too far with this either.)

More here — Including how to avoid the collapse

The dangerous, undefined, undisclosed, self-certification and licensing of driverless vehicles

· https://imispgh.medium.com/the-dangerous-undefined-undisclosed-self-certification-and-licensing-of-driverless-vehicles-c3ffa6da866b

By not providing any meaningful proof of being driverless, even fighting doing through a lawsuit, Waymo, Cruise and Gatik are misleading the public, putting their lives at risk, and collapsing

· https://imispgh.medium.com/by-not-providing-any-meaningful-proof-of-being-driverless-even-fighting-doing-through-a-lawsuit-f07790d6f96a

Cognitive Dissonance and the Driverless Vehicle Industry

· https://imispgh.medium.com/cognitive-dissonance-and-the-driverless-vehicle-industry-83f878a2e393

Autonomous Vehicle Industry’s Self-Inflicted and Avoidable Collapse — Ongoing Update

· https://imispgh.medium.com/autonomous-vehicle-industrys-self-inflicted-and-avoidable-collapse-ongoing-update-c21d9e65cc35

The Autonomous Vehicle Industry can be Saved by doing the Opposite of what is being done now

· https://medium.com/@imispgh/the-autonomous-vehicle-industry-can-be-saved-by-doing-the-opposite-of-what-is-being-done-now-b4e5c6ae9237

How the failed Iranian hostage rescue in 1980 can save the Autonomous Vehicle industry

My name is Michael DeKort — I am Navy veteran (ASW C4ISR) and a former system engineer, engineering, and program manager for Lockheed Martin. I worked in aircraft simulation, the software engineering manager for all of NORAD, a software project manager on an Aegis Weapon System baseline, and a C4ISR systems engineer for DoD/DHS and the US State Department (counterterrorism). And a Senior Advisory Technical Project Manager for FTI to the Army AI Task Force at CMU NREC (National Robotics Engineering Center)

Autonomous Industry Participation — Air and Ground

- Founder SAE On-Road Autonomous Driving Simulation Task Force

- Member SAE ORAD Verification and Validation Task Force

- Member UNECE WP.29 SG2 Virtual Testing

- Stakeholder USDOT VOICES (Virtual Open Innovation Collaborative Environment for Safety)

- Member SAE G-35, Modeling, Simulation, Training for Emerging AV Tech

- Member SAE G-34 / EUROCAE WG-114 Artificial Intelligence in Aviation

- Member Teleoperation Consortium

- Member CIVATAglobal — Civic Air Transport Association

- Stakeholder for UL4600 — Creating AV Safety Guidelines

- Member of the IEEE Artificial Intelligence & Autonomous Systems Policy Committee

SAE Autonomous Vehicle Engineering magazine editor calling me “prescient” regarding my position on Tesla and the overall driverless vehicle industry’s untenable development and testing approach — (Page 2) https://assets.techbriefs.com/EML/2021/digital_editions/ave/AVE-202109.pdf

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Michael DeKort

Non-Tribal Truth Seeker-IEEE Barus Ethics Award/9–11 Whistleblower-Aerospace/DoD Systems Engineer/Member SAE Autonomy and eVTOL development V&V & Simulation