Apple ramps up testing of its self-driving car

The idea of an Apple Car - beautifully designed, always connected, obviously autonomous and reassuringly expensive - seems like a surefire home run, yet it seems to be taking longer to come to market than the hover boards from Back to the Future II.

This might lead you to think there’s little substance to the rumours, but the fact Apple is genuinely working on a self-self-driving car has been proven with the release yesterday of data from the California Department of Motor Vehicles that shows that Apple undertook exactly 128,337km of testing for its mysterious machine in 2018.

Apple is famously super secretive and would never voluntarily admit to anything at all, but under Californian law all companies testing autonomous vehicles must log the miles its vehicles have done without a driver at the wheel, and the authorities then release those figures to the public.

California regulators call these “disengagement reports”, which measure how often a human driver had to intervene to take control from an autonomous-driving system during testing on public roads.

Because this is a pretty serious safety issue, as you can imagine. Apple, which wouldn’t comment beyond the documents it was forced to file publicly, only applied for a permit to conduct testing in California in 2017, and it lags well behind the leader in the autonomous-driving field, Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet, the cool arm of Google.

Waymo has conducted 16 million kilometres of testing around the world for what used to be called the Google Car.

Comparatively, though, Apple is ramping up its road-testing schedule, because last year’s 120,000km-plus figure compared to just 1348km in 2017.

So, Google/Alphabet/Waymo might well beat Apple onto public roads with self-driving cars, or taxis, but make no mistake, the Apple Car is coming. And the queues at your local Apple Store/Garage will be huge. 

Will your Apple love extend to a car? Tell us what you think in the comments below.