Doing the kind of Apple legwork the young reporters at 9to5Mac do best, Jordan Kahn and Mark Gurman have assembled photographs and brief resumes of 19 employees assigned to Project Titan.
That’s the code name, according to the Wall Street Journal, of a mysterious Apple skunkworks whose purpose has been the subject of intense speculation for the past week.
So far most of the press reports — including a story, belatedly, in Friday’s New York Times — are based on leaks from one or two unnamed sources.
Kahn and Gurman’s work is bottom up, much of it done on LinkedIn, and it’s far more persuasive.
Their Project Titan Who’s Who includes:
- The CEO of Mercedes Benz R&D Division
- Autoliv’s Airbag designer
- Tesla’s gearbox performance testing manager
- A Tesla mechanical engineer
- A transmission and mechanical design engineer from EMCO Gears
- A senior power train test engineer fromTesla
- A car battery R&D team from A123 (see Sued if you poach)
- A drivetrain engineer from a wind turbine company
- A product development engineering manager from within Apple
- A product engineer from Ford’s hybrid electric car division
- The chief power train engineer at MIT Motorosports
- Tesla’s lead manufacturing/mechanical engineer recruiter
- A controls engineer from Concept Systems
- A senior product design engineer from within Apple
- The director of iPod product design
- An iOS product design manager
- The lead design engineer at General Dynamics
- A BlackBerry exec who worked on the widely used QNX car platform
- A team leader who started out at Ford
.
Evident by this long list of automotive experts,” Kahn and Gurman conclude, “it’s clear Apple’s ambitions go well beyond just its iOS-based CarPlay in-dash system. Well beyond software too, as many of the names [above] are hardware engineers coming from Tesla, Ford and other notable automotive related areas. In fact, the majority of employees on this list that are reporting to team leader Steve Zadesky come from an automotive hardware background and many only joined Apple recently.”
Link: The experts Apple hired to build an electric car
Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple AAPL coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed.
