Apple Confirms They Are Working On 'Autonomous Systems'

 

Apple has finally opened up about their project regarding self-driving cars, joining the likes of Google (Waymo), Tesla and GM.

In a recent interview, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook talked about the company’s involvement in “autonomous systems”. He didn’t go into much detail but he did make it clear Apple isn’t ready to announce the self-driving car product just yet.

He says –

“We're focusing on autonomous systems. And clearly one purpose of autonomous systems is self-driving cars, there are others. And we sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects. It's probably one of the most difficult AI projects, actually, to work on, and so autonomy is something that's incredibly exciting for us, and we’ll see where it takes us. We're not really saying from a product point of view what we will do, but we are being straightforward that it's a core technology that we view is very important.”

Despite not giving much away, Apple did confirm that they are working on autonomous systems, which could mean they are working on self-driving technology but it could also mean something completely different.

Apple expected to offer an autonomous car product in the future, merging it with their other products like CarPlay.

But, don’t expect to see an iCar.   

Previous rumours have suggested that Apple was originally going to be building a car, and Steve Jobs expressed interested in this back in 2008. Although newer rumours suggested that Apple is specifically focusing on self-driving software now.

Apple is definitely getting involved in the car service industry, having invested $1bn (£785m) in China's ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing last year.

This news also coincides with General Motors announcing that they have completed production of 130 self-driving cars and intend to start testing them in San Francisco and Scottsdale, Arizona, in conjunction with Lyft (a transportation network company, like Uber) next month.

Jaguar Land Rover also announced plans to start testing self-driving cars with Lyft in the near future.

So the future of self-driving cars looks very promising, and we can expect to see some Apple branding within them one day.