Apple’s Tim Cook confirms self-driving car plans
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Apple’s chief executive has confirmed it is developing a self-driving car system.
But Tim Cook indicated that it is too soon to say whether it would license the tech to other carmakers or attempt to build its own vehicles.
His interview with the Bloomberg news agency yielded his most detailed comments about the project to date.
There had also been leaked details of a switch in leadership of the car team, with veteran hardware specialist Bob Mansfield reportedly put in charge last year, as well as pics of test vehicles being published on rumour sites.
"We’re focusing on autonomous systems and clearly one purpose of autonomous systems is self-driving cars – there are others," Mr Cook told Bloomberg.
"And we sort of see it as the the mother of all AI [artificial intelligence] projects.
"It’s very likely one of the most difficult AI projects to work on.
"We’ll see where it takes us. We’re not telling from a product point of view where it will take us, but we are being straightforward that it’s a core technology that we view as very significant."
He added that the rise of AI, electrified vehicles and ride-sharing introduced an chance.
"There is a major disruption looming," he said.
"You’ve got kind of three vectors of switch happening generally in the same timeframe."
Apple invested $1bn (£785m) in China’s ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing last year.
The publication of the interview coincides with an announcement by General Motors that it has finished production of one hundred thirty self-driving Chevrolet Bolt cars at a factory in Michigan.
It intends to embark testing them in San Francisco and Scottsdale, Arizona, in conjunction with the ride-hailing hard Lyft next month,
Jaguar Land Rover also exposed plans this week to test self-driving cars with Lyft in the future.
Meantime, Audi has begun taunting a July expose of a fresh car – the A8 – that will introduce semi-autonomous features of its own.
"It’s still very unclear who is going to come out on top in this space," commented Jim Holder, editorial director of Autocar magazine.
"There has been a period of about five years in which car companies and tech companies have been dancing around each other being very wary of the other’s motivations.
"Now it looks like they have realised they have to get into bed together to succeed.
"Apple shows up not to have an appetite to get into the carmaking business, which is famously low profit margin and high investment. But it can succeed by being a supplier and doing what it does best, which is working to seven-month cycles, while the car industry is more used to working on a seven-year cycle to produce a vehicle."
