Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is scaling down their project for a self-driving car, according to The New York Times.
Instead of focusing on an Apple-branded autonomous car, the tech giant is “focusing on autonomous systems”, looking at the technology involved.
Putting the “Apple Car” on hold, Apple plans to work with other carmakers to get the new self-driving tech into the new autonomous cars that will be in future garages and driveways of customers.
The news from Apple is similar to an announcement made by rival Waymo in 2016.
“We are a self-driving technology company,” said Waymo’s chief executive John Krafcik. “We’ve been really clear that we’re not a car company, although there’s been some confusion on that point. We’re not in the business of making better cars. We’re in the business of making better drivers.”
Apple’s in-house car team have been working extensively on different projects since “Project Titan” in 2014.
Projects included motorized doors that opened and closed silently, adding virtual or augmented reality into interior displays, and a new light and ranging detection sensor, also known as lidar.
Test vehicles will carry employees between its various Silicon Valley offices but are yet to be in operation.
“You can tell them it’s a bundle of self-driving assist systems, but when the sucker drives them for the next three hours just dandy, they rely on their short term experience with it, and if it’s been doing well, they’ll just relax,” said Nathaniel Fairfield, a principal engineer with X’s self-driving car team.
“You can say whatever you want to say, and people are going to interpret it however they interpret it, and at the end of the day you end up with whatever happens. People have better things to do with their time in cars these days” than sit and watch the road, and the ultimate goal of the self-driving car project is to let people actually do that.”