I've Wanted An Apple Car Since Lowly Worm

With an interest in cars and technology, my internet news sources explode when there's a story that involves both. Normally the tech/car worlds would be talking about Nissan's crazy 1000 horsepower front-drive race car they’re taking to Le Mans. But this week that was overshadowed by the news that Apple is doing something to do with cars.

There have been rumours for a while, and now it comes out that Apple has hired a number of ex-Tesla employees. Now the Wall Street Journal claims that they are working on a self-driving electric car. Supposedly it's called Project Titan. "Titan" happens to be the name of Nissan's pickup, so that's two ways Apple has stolen their thunder.

So is this really happening? I still have my doubts. I stand by my earlier thoughts that fully self-driving cars will take longer than people are now expecting. I'd also add that for any tech companies looking to get into car technology, setting up your own company and doing it all yourself is a really bad move. For one thing, a lot of the things that make cars hard to design and build today - from suspension to safety - don’t go away just because your car is electric and self-driving. Also, you can’t just contract the construction to the lowest-bidding sweat-shop from southeast Asia.

There's some talk that Apple just wants to develop software that would go into other companies' cars. That seems more sensible to me, though others have pointed out that it's not Apple's style to put their software on other people's devices. They like to sell one complete product to the customer.

I think the most sensible thing would be for them to make an Operating System for car infotainment systems. I’m thinking more than just supplying the software for car touch screens, but actually dictating the design of the entire interface between the driver and car’s systems.

The computer interfaces built by the car manufacturers or other tech companies have been widely criticized, and it’s the sort of thing Apple could really improve on. It’s not quite building their own equipment in the sense of building the entire car, but they could be the supplier of the dash/instrumentation. This would allow them the control they want, without the massive investment in businesses they have no experience with.