The idea of having an Apple Car is incredibly appealing, even with the electric vehicle market getting increasingly competitive. It’s no secret that iPhone sales have levelled off in recent years, and Apple needs that “next big thing” for the world to obsess about.
The Apple Car could be that thing, especially if the rumors are true, and the car will be completely autonomous. Rumors have circulated for years, but we’ve never actually heard anything official from Apple itself. But we still know that the Apple Car exists, though it may not be arriving for quite some time.
But this won’t just be any car, Apple is reportedly working on a fully autonomous self-driving car. While that’s nothing new, the Apple Car is said to be one you can buy and keep in your garage rather than something you would summon from an app. It’ll be a huge deal if Apple can pull it off.
Details are still pretty scarce right now, but the prospect of getting the Apple Car within a few years has plenty of people excited. If you’re one of them, and want to learn more, you’re in the right place. Here’s everything we know about the Apple Car, including leaks, rumors, and that all-important release date.
Latest Apple Car news (updated May 8)
Apple Car release date
So far Apple hasn’t explicitly commented on the Apple Car and when we might be able to drive one. If you can call using an autonomous car driving, that is.
A suite of reports have claimed Apple was in talks with the likes of Hyundai and Kia to bring the Apple Car onto highways in the near future, but those looks to have be squashed a little.
The latest production partner rumour has LG and auto part supplier Magna pegged as the partners to help the Apple Car become a real-world machine. And if such a deal is done, Cupertino’s car could has been tipped to arrive in 2024. We need to take this with a degree of skepticism, as car making is a lot harder than smartphone designing. But things are looking quietly optimistic that we’ll see the Apple Car before too long.
Apple Car features
The Apple Car won’t be your typical electric car, instead it’s going to be completely autonomous and will do all the driving for you. To get around the car is going to be equipped with LiDAR sensors that will help it “see” the world around it.
Apple is no stranger to LiDAR, having included it on certain high-end iPhones and iPad Pros, and everything we’ve seen suggests it’ll be coming to the Apple Car as well.
LiDAR is short for “Light Detection and Ranging”, and the system works by sending out pulsed lasers. Those lasers will be reflected back to the car’s sensors as it hits objects, and using that information it forms a picture of what objects are in the surrounding area and how far away they are.
But LiDAR is used by almost every self-driving car out there. In fact only Tesla has sworn off LiDAR in favor of a computational vision system.
With that in mind, the Apple Car is going to need to have a fair bit of computing power behind it, and a report from analyst Colin Barnden suggests that it could all come from a “C1” chip. Per Barnden, this will be based on the iPhone XS’s A12 Bionic and will pack in AI-centric features.
MacRumors notes that this report is highly speculative, though, and it would be quite strange for the Apple Car to be powered by a chip that will be six years old in 2024. The A12 is powerful, but Apple has plenty more chips that perform even better, and it seems unlikely it would opt for such ageing hardware.
What really sets the Apple Car apart, from what we’ve heard, is its monocell battery technology. According to reports, this maximizes the size of the cells inside the Apple Car’s battery pack, which means it theoretically gets a longer range out of a single charge.
Reports also claim Apple is also set to use lithium iron phosphate in its batteries, rather than the usual lithium-ion solution, which is less likely to overheat. That should, in turn, make the car much safer.
Where’s the Apple Car being built?
Apple is, as many people know, a computing company with absolutely zero experience building and selling cars. So the prospect of it actually building the Apple Car itself is kind of laughable.
It’s more likely the actual manufacturing would be outsourced to a different company with all the relevant resources already. While there’s no shortage of automakers out there, it’s been reported that many of them are hesitant about being involved with the Apple Car.
Evidentially the big brands don’t want to end up as “the Foxconn of the auto industry”, referencing the Taiwanese company best known for manufacturing iPhones and other products for the company.
Right now the frontrunner for Apple Car construction is said to be LG and Canadian auto-parts manufacturer Magna. Magna has manufacturing plants all over the world, so it’s not clear which ones would be used to build the Apple Car.
Earlier this year it was reported that Hyundai was the frontrunner for Apple Car, though it’s since been reported that Hyundai isn’t particularly interested in developing a car under someone else’s name. For reasons that relate to wanting to grow its own brand, and concern Apple would be taking charge and leave the Korean car maker as a factory OEM.
Instead Kia, a Hyundai subsidiary, was said to be taking on the Apple Car instead. Not only does that mean Hyundai retains a stake in the Apple Car’s success, while also keeping the project at arm’s length, developing a third party vehicle fits in well with its recently announced “Plan S” strategy. Unfortunately talks broke down after news of the potential deal leaked, with Apple “pausing” talks and looking elsewhere.
There have been reports that the Kia deal isn’t completely dead, though we haven’t heard anything positive on that front in the months since.
Reports claim the auto-maker had planned to use its Georgia plant for assembly. We don’t have many details on this, but if the Apple Car is set to go on sale in the U.S. (which seems more than likely), then a U.S. based assembly plant is the obvious choice. Even if it means shipping in the right parts from elsewhere.
Ming-Chi Kuo has also claimed that Apple is partnering up with Hyundai to use its E-GMP battery electric vehicle platform. That will form the basis of the Apple Car’s first chassis. Apple is also said to be considering partnerships with General Motors and European car maker PSA, who may help the Apple Car launch in international markets.
Apple Car: What it would look like
Given where we are in the Apple Car development cycle — it’s still pretty early on — there’s not a lot of images out there to reveal what an Apple-designed car might look like. So we’ve got concept designers stepping up to fill in the gap between imagination and reality.
One of the boldest designs we’ve seen so far comes from designer Leasefecher, which released a series of renders that imagine Apple Cars based on famous Apple products. Our favorite example takes a Nissan GT-R and combines it with an iPhone 12 Pro, but there are other concepts from Leasefetcher that draw on the original iMac and iPod for inspiration.
Apple Car: Development history
The history of the Apple car goes all the way back to 2014 under the name “Project Titan,” purportedly with the goal of releasing it to the public in 2020. Obviously that never happened, but reports seem to suggest that some progress is being made on making the Apple Car a reality.
We have had glimpses of some sort of Apple affiliated vehicle, supposedly testing self-driving tech, throughout California. Apple has always kept those details close to its chest, like it does with everything else, so we don’t have any official statements on what these cars were up to.
What we do know for sure is that these cars weren’t the same vehicles the company used to collect data for Apple Maps.
That said, hiring engineers from the likes of Mercedes, Tesla, and other big car companies confirms Cupertino has some sort of automotive ambitions. But mass layoffs suggest that Apple Car development has not been totally smooth sailing.
The first wave reportedly came in 2016, while another 200 were reportedly moved off the project as recently as January 2019. It’s not clear what happens in both cases, though it was suggested that management didn’t really know where the self-driving car project was going.
A Bloomberg report also reports that the Apple Car has lost three executives in recent months. Dave Scott who led robotics teams, Jaime Waydo who led autonomous driving safety and regulation teams, plus Benjamin Lyon who helped put together the original Apple Car team all those years ago.
Considering reports claim thousands of employees have been working on the Apple Car, these layoffs and staff departures probably won’t have any serious impact on development. Of course, we don’t know for sure, and we likely never will, even if the Apple Car does arrive in 2024, as expected.
Apple Car: What Apple has said
Apple is usually mum about unreleased products, and the Apple Car is no exception. However, Tim Cook has confirmed that the automotive sector has piqued Apple’s interest, hinting at his company’s car plans during an appearance on Kara Swisher’s Sway podcast.
“We investigate so many things internally,” Cook said. “Many of them never see the light of day. I’m not saying that one will not.”
More encouragingly, Cook seemed to suggest that should Apple get involved with cars, it would not be content to merely design a software setup and hand it over to a car manufacturer. “We love to integrate hardware, software, and services, and find the intersection points of those because we think that’s where the magic occurs,” Cook said. “And so that’s what we love to do. And we love to own the primary technology that’s around that.”
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