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Faraday Future hired Bosch’s automated driving director to lead its own self-driving effort

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Since its inception less than 2 years ago, Faraday Future managed some impressive high-profile hires for a startup still in stealth mode until very recently. From Tesla executives to successful designers and veterans auto industry engineers, we have been scratching our heads figuring out how the company is able to attract so much talent so quickly ($?), and it’s not over.

FF’s latest hire might be its most high-profile to date. Electrek learned that Faraday recently tipped Bosch engineering director and leading automated driving expert Jan Becker to lead the startup’s own effort in vehicle automation.

Not many people out there have more experience with autonomous driving than Jan Becker. According to his LinkedIn profile, Becker spent the last 15 years at Bosch, where he has been Principal Engineer at the German electronics giant’s Palo Alto Lab from 2009 to 2014. In 2014, he became director of the company’s multi-disciplinary team developing autonomous vehicle.

From 2007 to 2009, he was part of the team led by Prof. Sebastian Thrun, Google X founder and father of Google’s self-driving car program, which participated in the DARPA Urban Challenge.

Since 2010, he has been lecturing a class about Driver Assistance and Vehicle Automation at Stanford University. As for his own academic background, Becker holds a Master of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the University at Buffalo, a Diplom (highest non-PhD degree in Germany) in Electrical Engineering  from Darmstadt University of Technology, and finally a Ph.D. in Control Engineering from the Technical University of Braunschweig.

He has been involved with dozens scientific papers and patents about automated driving.

What is particularly interesting here is that Bosch is committed to self-driving technology. The company is a supplier for Tesla’s Autopilot program and has been developing its own effort in the field from the ground up, which makes it even more intriguing that such an expert who’s leading the company’s effort in the technology decided to jump from one of the most important auto parts supplier and engineering firm in world to a relatively small startup.

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Comments

  1. awkward001 - 8 years ago

    Maybe its like a country club/ retreat for engineers: They do real work with real companies for a few years then come onboard at FF to chill out, throw ideas around without actually producing anything.

  2. Walt - 8 years ago

    They are Apple. Not FF, but Ac (look at logo) , aka Apple.car… How else do you hide several hundred high profile engineers in plain sight.

  3. Eric - 8 years ago

    Minor and nitpicking correction, Fred: as an alum, it’s University at Buffalo, not of Buffalo. Technically, the State University of New York at Buffalo, but nobody uses that. Cheers!

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Avatar for Fred Lambert Fred Lambert

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