Apple Car: The Road Ahead

Cupertino’s pressing the pedal to the metal for its first, all-electric car

- Charlotte Henry

For a long time, we’ve heard rumours and discussion about the possibility of an Apple-designed and branded car. The company already makes the CarPlay software, but is reportedly looking to build its own vehicles too, ones that align with its green credentials.

While it seems likely that it will still be a few years until we see any such vehicle on the road, a recent flurry of news indicates that not only are those plans very much real and ongoing, they may now even be accelerating.

The history bit…

Work on an Apple Car began in 2014, under the internal codename Project Titan. It is understood that at least 1,000 engineers are part of the efforts for the company to produce an electric vehicle, and that they are located at a secret site near Apple’s Cupertino headquarters. In typical Apple fashion, it not only wants to design a vehicle from scratch, it wants to dramatically shake up battery technology to reduce the cost and increase the range of the vehicle. (The cost, in particular, is still something of a mark against the most obvious direct rival – Tesla.)

In 2016, longtime Apple exec Bob Mansfield was lured out of semi-retirement and given the responsibility of leading Project Titan. However, it took until 2017 for Apple to really publicly acknowledge what it was working on. In June that year, CEO Tim Cook told Bloomberg that the company was “focusing on autonomous systems.” Cook said that this is “a core technology that we view as very important,” adding that “it’s probably one of the most difficult AI projects to work on.”