The mountain of evidence pointing to Apple’s active interest in developing an electric car continues to grow. This past December, Apple registered three separate auto-related domain names: apple.car, apple.cars, and apple.auto. Originally unearthed by MacRumors, the domain names aren’t yet active and may have simply been acquired to prevent domain squatting in the future.
While it’s entirely plausible that the domain names were perhaps purchased with CarPlay in mind, it seems a tad improbable that Apple’s car-oriented software would be deemed special or important enough to warrant a trio of auto-centric domain registrations.
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A more probable scenario, I think, is that the domain purchases are related to Apple’s ambitions in the EV space. While rumors of Apple developing an electric car may have seemed outlandish at first, it’s all but impossible to ignore the circumstantial evidence and sheer volume of reports from different sources which suggests that Apple’s car plans are very much real.
Just this past September, for instance, the Wall Street Journal indicated that Apple had begun taking steps to accelerate development of its electric car initiative and had just recently tripled the size of the project’s development team. Not only that, the report also added that Apple sent an internal and ambitious shipping date of 2019, echoing a similar report from Bloomberg.
Other telling signs include Apple going on a hiring spree and bringing in numerous engineers and executives with deep business and technical expertise across all areas of the car development and manufacturing process, including employees from companies such as Tesla and BMW.
In fact, one report that surfaced this past summer claimed that Apple’s car development team was becoming so big that it was starting to ruffle a few feathers across other divisions within the company.
“Apple has shifted so much staff towards its auto division that senior managers in other divisions are complaining about the loss of talent from their teams,” The Register reported a few months ago.
