Prison and Fine for Engineer Who Stole Apple Car Plans

It is known that Apple has been developing cars for more than a decade. The car, about which not much information has been shared until today, came to the fore with a theft incident within the company years ago. There was an important development regarding the incident today.

According to 9to5Mac, the person who stole information about Apple’s driverless car called “Project Titan” in 2018 Xiaolang Zhang, 120 days in prison and 146 thousand 984 dollars He was sentenced to imprisonment. The normal sentence for Zhang was 10 years in prison and a fine of 250 thousand dollars.

Zhang stole a 25-page document about Apple’s car and passed it on to a car company in China

Xiaolang Zhang, who works at the company as a hardware engineer, created a video containing the schematics of the company’s autonomous vehicle in 2018. Transferring a 25-page document to his wife’s computer via AirDrop had stolen. He also copied manuals describing Apple’s prototypes and documents from the company’s development labs.

In the same year, Zhang took leave from Apple and went to China. However, he never returned from this trip and informed the company that he was resigning. The engineer gave the reason for this as a Chinese automotive company. Will work at Xpeng Motors offered it to be. After this, Apple became suspicious because Xpeng was also working on autonomous vehicles and launched an investigation against Zhang. The investigation revealed through security cameras that Zhang had stolen the documents.

Zhang, who worked on many projects, especially autonomous vehicles, during his time at Apple, was caught at San Jose Airport in the USA in July 2018 while trying to go to China. The engineer, who did not admit his crime at first, claimed that he had stolen the documents in 2022 Confessed. The decision taken now determined his punishment.

It is still unknown whether Apple will actually release its autonomous vehicle. Recent information has revealed that the company continues to work on the vehicle, but has given up the idea of ​​making it fully autonomous. It was claimed that the release date would not be from 2028.