An Apple car is in the works, and here’s everything we know about it
The Apple car is coming, that’s a certainty. But this isn’t news. The tech firm has been flirting with the idea of making a car since 2008, when Steve Jobs first reportedly considered it. Rumours picked up in 2015, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that Apple had hundreds of employees working on what it dubbed ‘Project Titan’ – a fully autonomous electric vehicle. This was at a time when Google was working on its own driverless cars, and Tesla was starting to make waves with its original Roadster. Apple even courted former Tesla employees for its car’s development, with Elon Musk going as far to say, “We always jokingly call Apple the ‘Tesla Graveyard’. If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go to work at Apple.”
Will it really be an autonomous vehicle?
And then nothing happened. Apple has never publicly announced its automotive plans and, eight years later, facts are sparse. But there are some (fairly) concrete details that have emerged during this time that help paint the picture of what the Apple car will be. The first is that it will no longer be fully autonomous. Bloomberg reported in December 2022 that plans for a fully self-driving car have been scrapped. It was previously thought that Apple would hit the market with something that had never been done before. Early predictions for the car were that it wouldn’t have a steering wheel or pedals, and that interior seating would be ‘communal’, so you could talk facing each other while AI took you to your destination.
For the car’s initial launch though, it will be partially autonomous, instead featuring a traditional driving seat, steering wheel and pedals. The idea is that you can watch a film on its presumably large, screened interface while the car drives you on the motorway, but you can quickly take over the duties when approaching a town or city. This means the Apple Car will be less revelatory, placing it more in line with what’s already out there from the likes of Tesla and co. Tim Cook confirmed back in 2017 that Apple is working on ‘autonomous systems’ behind driverless cars, so this is clearly a blow to what they initially hoped to release. It also shows just how difficult it is to enter the market with such an ambitious idea, even if your company is worth $2.26 trillion.
How much will it cost?
This scaling back ties in with the next point. Apple originally planned to sell the car for around $120,000, but according to Bloomberg’s sources, the target is now under $100,000. That $20k isn’t likely to affect those in the market for one, but it does place it in the sights of a well-specced Tesla Model S, a Mercedes EQC and at the top end, a BMW i7. It’s not cheap, but it was never going to be. Apple made £1,000 phones the norm, so it makes sense it would produce cars at similarly luxurious price points.
Speaking of phones, the Apple car will of course feature deep iOS integration. For certain Apple users, this is arguably the biggest draw. Carmakers have for years been trying to incorporate phones and tech into cars, and now it’s the other way round. A seamless pairing of your car with your phone has many exciting possibilities, one of which being remote driving, Tomorrow Never Dies style. Apple is said to be looking into users being able to command its car from a distance – whether it will require you to engage your Gran Turismo skills or not is uncertain.
And then there are the pending patents. Just this year alone Apple has applied for a series of them, according to Patently Apple. There’s a road surface monitoring system that detects low friction roads and conditions up ahead. There’s a patent for ‘movable sensors’, which measures vehicle speed, location, weather and environment; one for ‘smart headlights’; another ‘adjustable exterior lighting’ patent, and one for inventing ‘adjustable tinted windows’, which can be darkened or go hazy on demand.
When it comes to the Apple Car roadmap, things are getting clearer. Bloomberg’s insiders report that the design will be confirmed by this year, with the features, stats and details finalised by the end of 2024. Testing will then begin in 2025, with the car set to go into production and on the market in 2026. If that’s all true, things will start to move quickly from now on. Whether Apple will revolutionise the car industry, like it did with computers, music and phones, will remain to be seen.
