Apple Automotive Adventures

[Older Apple products] Photo via (Flickr) under the Creative Commons license. [https://www.flickr.com/photos/jfingas/5068664590/]

[Older Apple products] Photo via (Flickr) under the Creative Commons license. [https://www.flickr.com/photos/jfingas/5068664590/]

When you walk into someone’s house these days, you are likely to see Apple this and Apple that and I’m not talking about the fruit. Unless you are the type of person who is avidly against Apple products, you may be thrilled to hear that there is speculation of a new product that Apple is making: an Apple car.

There is a list of evidence that Apple may be closing in on the automobile industry, including their new interest in car batteries, new executives, their discussions with Tesla, and a mysterious van seen roaming around.

Within the last few months, Apple has started hiring engineers from the electric car battery maker, A123 Systems. They have hired enough engineers for A123 Systems to sue them on the terms that Apple is “playing dirty” and are ruining their business. A123 Systems make hybrid car batteries and it seems useless to hire such specialized engineers for anything other than automobiles.

It seems that Apple actually knows how to run a business, hiring people that are competent in their field. A longtime engineer at Autoliv, a maker of car-safety systems, just started working on a “special projects group” at Apple last month, records show. It’s not just recently; over the past few years, Apple have been “collecting” men and women from the car industry, including several from Tesla.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk acknowledged that he did meet with Apple’s acquisitions chief last year, following a San Francisco Chronicle report. Although he would not say the reason. “We had conversations with Apple. I can’t comment on whether those revolved around any acquisition,” Musk recently told Bloomberg news anchor Betty Liu.

The weirdest piece of evidence, however, is not Apple’s fascination with hiring hundreds of people, it’s a van. An unmarked van with cameras and sensors has been spotted driving around in cities like Brooklyn and San Francisco. The sensors all over the van indicate that it is doing more than just Google-style street mapping, according to engineers familiar with self-driving cars. California’s Department of Motor Vehicles has the one in San Francisco as registered and leased to Apple, according to the CBS affiliate there.

No one is saying that this is real – so you can stop breathing heavy and put your smartphones back down in their place. However, if this is happening, the technology you have known as indulgencies in the last few years may become something more apparent and necessary in your day to day life other than for just listening to music and playing Fruit Ninja.