After years toiling away in secret on its car project, Apple Inc chief executive officer Tim Cook has for the first time laid out exactly what the company is up to in the automotive market: It is concentrating on self-driving technology.
“We’re focusing on autonomous systems,” Cook said in an interview on Bloomberg TV on Monday last week. “It’s a core technology that we view as very important.”
“We sort of see it as the mother of all AI [artificial intelligence] projects,” Cook said in his most detailed comments to date on Apple’s plans in the car space. “It’s probably one of the most difficult AI projects actually to work on.”
Apple had initially been seeking to build its own car, before recalibrating those ambitions last year to prioritize the underlying technology for autonomous driving, Bloomberg News reported.
The iPhone maker had hired more than 1,000 engineers to work on Project Titan, as the car team is known internally, after it started in 2014.
Ballooning costs and headcount led to Apple veteran Bob Mansfield being given the reins of the team last year.
Cook has never before openly outlined Apple’s plans, although public filings have surfaced in recent months that provided snapshots of Apple’s efforts.
Apple in April secured a permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test three self-driving sports-utility vehicles, photographs of which emerged several weeks later.
A half-dozen vehicles had been surreptitiously testing the autonomous technology on public roads in and around the San Francisco Bay area for at least a year, according to someone familiar with Project Titan.
In December last year, Steve Kenner, Apple’s director of product integrity, penned a letter to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration revealing the company’s interest in automotive technology. It became public when it was published on a federal Web site.
In the letter, Kenner wrote about the company’s excitement surrounding the potential for automated systems in fields like transportation.
“There is a major disruption looming there,” Cook said on Bloomberg TV, citing self-driving technology, electric vehicles and ride-hailing. “You’ve got kind of three vectors of change happening generally in the same time frame.”
In the interview on Bloomberg TV, Cook was hesitant to disclose whether Apple will ultimately manufacture its own car.
“We’ll see where it takes us,” Cook said. “We’re not really saying from a product point of view what we will do.”
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