apple icar iCar is a VW Mini Van

[G. David Felt]

iCar is a VW Mini Van

According to story's at other sites, Apple is finally going to hit the road with their own autonomous auto. These auto's are going to be used to ferry employees around their new campus. Apple has partnered up with Volkswagen to use the T6 as their proof of concept in autonomous auto's. These vans will be outfitted at a VW assembly plant in Italy with the electric powertrain, sensors, software and battery packs.

According to the NY Times story, Apple wanted to partner with Mercedes-Benz or BMW to develop their all electric self driving auto. This was all rebuffed after Apple wanted control and all data along with the design to be handed over to them according to people familiar with the talks. VW declined to comment on this matchup with Apple. Apple also declined to talk but insiders have said that Apples plans beyond getting these vans onto the campus is lacking in any direction and has led from the 1,000 person team of employees to just hundreds as others left for greener paths at Waymo and GM who both have autonomous auto's on the road now and will be expanding their fleet. Seems Apple who has a 50 auto fleet of Lexus SUV's that are daily testing their sensors and software and autonomous driving on ICE auto was unable to at first partner up with any auto company in the asian rim due to their requirements. Volkswagen behind in R&D compared to their german rivals and in the thick of a Diesel cheating scandal jumped at giving Apple all they asked for to gain a leg up in getting their EV auto R&D going. The original deadline to have these auto's on site and being used by the end of 2018 is going to be missed and first half of 2019 is more of a reality.

Uber has announced the complete shutdown of their autonomous project and layoff of the 300 employees they had on this at their Arizona R&D office.

• NY Times Story
• Green Car Reports