When Apple first began work on Project Titan — the code name for the company’s electric car initiative — its goals were incredibly ambitious. According to reports, Apple spent a lot of time trying to completely rethink the driving experience, even going so far as to contemplate designing a brand new car from scratch and look into the pros and cons of manufacturing it. Eventually, though, Apple began to scale back the scope of Project Titan amid reports that progress on the car wasn’t progressing as quickly as some Apple executives anticipated.
Rather than scrapping the initiative altogether, Apple shifted the focus of Project Titan towards developing underlying automotive technologies, with a specific focus on autonomous driving technology. Just two months ago, Tim Cook confirmed Apple’s work in this area.
“We sort of see [autonomous cars] as the mother of all AI projects,” Cook said during an interview with Bloomberg. “Autonomy is something that’s incredibly exciting for us, but we’ll see where it will take us. We’re not really saying from a product point of view what we’ll do, but we’re being straightforward that it’s a core technology we view as very important.”
To this point, Apple over the past few months has been busy testing autonomous vehicle technologies on a fleet of Lexus SUVs, photos of which first surfaced online this past April.
More recently, MacRumors published new photos of one of these Lexus SUVs, complete with a huge array of LIDAR and other sensors. A photo and brief video of the SUV can be seen below with more photos available over here.
