Apple officially confirms it’s working on autonomous cars

A self-driving Apple car could be coming sooner than expected

Apple has been rumoured to be working on its own self-driving car for some time and now it’s official. Tim Cook has said outright that Apple is working on autonomous car tech.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook said: “We're working on autonomous systems, it's a core technology that we view as very important.”

What kind of involvement Apple will have is unclear. Previous sightings of Apple leased cars testing self-driving tech suggests it could be working on its own car. Of course Tim Cook’s wording does also leave room for the possibility that Apple is merely working on the software that drives autonomous cars.

What kind of car would an autonomous Apple motor be? Electric of course. Speaking on the matter Tim Cook went on to say: “It's a marvellous experience not to stop at the filling station or gas station”.

Apple was also seen to have brought back Bob Mansfield to head up its car division. Everything points towards an Apple autonomous car.

Of course the road to autonomous cars is still a long one and Apple may simply be keeping up with the competition before deciding how to use its developed driving tech. Cook also said: “We'll see where it takes us, we're not really saying from a product point of view what we will do”.

Here’s hoping we see more on an Apple self-driving car soon.

Apple reportedly plans to kick off car production by 2020

Luke Edwards

Luke is a former freelance writer for T3 with over two decades of experience covering tech, science and health. Among many others Luke wrote about health tech, software and apps, VPNs, TV, audio, smart home, antivirus, broadband, smartphones, cars and plenty more. In his free time, Luke used to climb mountains, swim outside and contort his body into silly positions while breathing as calmly as possible.