Apple's ultra-secretive car project might have been served a substantial blow now that a key member of the team of the stature of project head has defected to the ambitious start-up Faraday Future.

Bart Nabbe who has been involved with Apple's Project Titan for the past two years is now showing his current position as the Director of Strategic Partnerships at Faraday Future in his Linked In profile, TheDetroitBureau reported.

Prior to joining Apple, Nabbe served as a research scientist at Toyota. Before that, Nabbe had been associated with the Carnegie Mellon University as an adjunct faculty member and has extensive experience in the fields of artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, computer oriented vision and so on.

Apple is yet to comment on the development such as how Nabbe's exit will affect the status of its Titan project and so on. In any case, Apple has already been maintaining a studied silence on the car venture and has never really acknowledged it. The closest we have ever had on that is a revelation by CEO Tim Cook that they would be entering the car business. He didn't specify in what capacity that would be.

Apple is rumored to be developing a highly advanced all-electric car that would have self-driving capability built into it right from day one. No doubt the said car will enjoy close integration with existing Apple hardware and software ecosystem such as the iPhone or iPad to apps like Apple Map and so on.

Nabbe's defection also marks an interesting turn of events considering that it is Apple that had earlier been known to aggressively poach on able employees from other companies. Off late, it has been steadily losing several of its most respected talents to companies like Tesla and such.

Meanwhile, the California based start-up Faraday Future too has been successful in maintaining a thick veil of secrecy over its automobile venture. The company has only the FFZERO1 concept, an all-electric 1000hp supercar of sorts to show off so far.

It is not known what its road going cars will be like though the real thing shouldn't be too far off either. As reported by Motor1, the company has already started constructing the facility where its cars would be put together in Nevada and will have an installed capacity to churn out 400,000 cars annually.

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