Apple may launch self-driving car in 2024

After phones, laptops, and audio products, Apple will soon foray into the automobile industry. As per Reuters, Apple is planning to build a self-driving car and could launch it in the market in 2024. The reports suggest that Apple could produce a passenger car with its own battery technology. Apple had reported started working on Project Titan, which is the name given to its auto venture.

While reports claimed that Apple had started working on the project in 2014, it was also reported that Apple had shelved its plans of producing cards in 2016. Out of 1000 employees, who were roped in for the Project Titan, 200 employees were laid off from Apple’s car team in 2016. Now the fresh report suggests that Apple is starting afresh. It has started working on producing a vehicle after shelving the idea earlier.

Sources familiar to the Apple car project had told Reuters that the car would be a passenger car. The sources also claimed that Apple would introduce a battery that could “radically" reduce the cost of the batteries and increase the vehicle’s range. “As for the car’s battery, Apple plans to use a unique “mono cell” design that bulks up the individual cells in the battery and frees up space inside the battery pack, one of the people said. That design means more active material can be packed inside the battery, giving the car a potentially longer range,” the Reuters report said.

“If there is one company on the planet that has the resources to do that, it’s probably Apple. But at the same time, it’s not a cellphone,” a source who worked with Project Titan told Reuters. The Apple source had called the battery technology “next level” and had also said it feels like the first time you saw an iPhone.

Apple has plans to rope in outside partners for “elements of the system”. The Cupertino giant plans to use LiDar sensors, which would help the cars get a three-dimensional view of the road, people familiar with the project told Reuters.

In 2017, Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke about Apple’s autonomous driving software. "We're focusing on autonomous systems. It's a core technology that we view as very important. 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,” Cook had said.