Apple's Project Titan is far from a well-kept secret. This is the electric car project that has been running in various forms since around 2014. There has been talk of partnerships with various car companies, from VW to Hyundai as well as the coming and going of car experts over the years.
Despite the project being far from secret, the final product has been kept under wraps. We're not even completely sure what form it will take. The latest thinking is that it will be a fully Apple-branded electric car, but there has been talk of a pure software solution as well as a more extreme autonomous vehicle.
One clue to Titan's rapidly developing form is the number of patents that have been filed. The British car leasing company Vanarama has taken these patents and added a little inspiration from other Apple products to create a render of what they believe the car could look like.
It's a well-thought-out project with lots of explanations given for each of the main features, both inside and outside of the vehicle. My only problem is that the sum of all these considered parts is frankly, rather ugly.
There are a number of things that we can expect from Apple's vision of the car, when it is finally announced. Firstly the user experience will be well thought out. For an electric car, this should extend from getting into the car to the actual driving experience. We can expect the technology to be advanced, if not necessarily groundbreaking. But one area I feel it will nail it, is in the design.
We know that Apple is working on autonomous driving abilities for this vehicle and there's even a suggestion that it won't have a steering wheel. Not requiring someone to be physically driving would completely change the internal layout of the vehicle with the potential to offer something much more social. However, even if the steering wheel remains, I think the layout will look significantly different from today's slightly space-age EV interiors.
If you look at some of Apple's biggest successes over the years – the iPhone, the MacBook, the iPad – the actual concept and technology already existed in other products on the market but it was the design and implementation that stood out.
That's why predicting what the Apple car will look like isn't as simple as taking a look at the patents and throwing in some previous Apple design features. All you end up with is something that looks like a slightly stunted Tesla.
With a final product not expected until at least 2025, there's still plenty of time to speculate but if you're going to dream something up, I think you need to dream much bigger.
