Apple CEO Tim Cook hinted in a new interview that the tech giant was working on an electric-vehicle project – but said many of Apple’s ideas “never see the light of day.”
Apple has kept its autonomous-vehicle project known internally as “Project Titan,” a closely guarded secret and has never confirmed it’s working on a car, but reports suggest it has spoken with automakers including Nissan and Hyundai about partnering on a vehicle.
“The autonomy itself is a core technology, in my view,” he said. “If you sort of step back, the car, in a lot of ways, is a robot. An autonomous car is a robot. And so there’s lots of things you can do with autonomy. And we’ll see what Apple does.” said Tim Cook
But Cook added that even if Apple was considering an autonomous car, the vehicle wouldn’t necessarily make it to market.
“We investigate so many things internally,” he said. “Many of them never see the light of day. I’m not saying that one will not.”
Cook declined to comment when asked whether Apple’s project was a car or the tech to put inside one but said the company loved “to integrate hardware, software, and services and find the intersection points of those – because we think that’s where the magic occurs.”
“And we love to own the primary technology that’s around that,” he added.
Apple has recently patented some vehicle features including ways to send alerts to drivers, reduce motion sickness, and create new climate controls, Insider’s Kevin Shalvey reported.
Apple wouldn’t be the only phone-maker looking at the booming electric-vehicle market.
On March 30, the Chinese phone-maker Xiaomi said it planned to invest $10 billion into a new smart electric vehicle unit over the next 10 years. The Xiaomi cofounder Lei Jun will serve as the CEO of the new unit, while also remaining CEO of the wider company.
