Apple’s talks with California motor vehicle department reveal autonomous car ambitions

Apple's legal team has recently met with officials of the California Department of Motor Vehicles, according to documents obtained by The Guardian. The meeting was attended by co-sponsors of the state's autonomous vehicle regulation project among others.

Apple is said to be working on its secret automotive project at a facility called "SG5" in Sunnyvale, California, under the cover of a shell company named "SixtyEight Research."

The meeting was noteworthy as Apple intended to put a self-driving car on the open road and also because it would presumably need to test for a considerable amount of time before putting it up on the market. It would need to disclose a great deal of information about its automobile, including make, model, and vehicle identification number.

The report yesterday suggested that Apple's meeting with the California DMV could mean that the rumored product was "almost ready for public view." The report further revealed that a new engineering programme manager had been assigned to the project, suggesting the vehicle was "ready to leave the lab."

AppleInsider's own sources, earlier this week revealed the Apple had been boosting hiring for "Project Titan" and, in the process, recruiting talent away from electric vehicle maker Tesla.

Meanwhile, the Department of Motor Vehicles admitted yesterday that it had met with Apple about the state's rules for testing autonomous vehicles on public streets, which comes as the clearest clue yet to Apple's long-rumored automotive ambitions.

Also online resumes and public records showed Apple had spent months poaching talent with automotive experience and renovating a new Sunnyvale office complex and auto workshop along what had become Silicon Valley's main thoroughfare of high-tech car innovation -- the Central Expressway.

A number of other companies, including Google and carmakers Tesla, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Honda and Volkswagen, 10 in all, had taken permission from the state to test autonomous vehicles on public roads. Most of them had research labs near the 12-mile thoroughfare that stretches from Palo Alto through Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara.

Meanwhile, Google, which had been open about its automomous vehicle goal, signalled its move from experimentation to the consumer product stage when it hired auto industry veteran John Krafcik to be the first CEO of its 6-year-old project.

According to commentators, this meant, Apple, if fully autonomous cars is its goal, has a long way to go.

"To get to something like what Google has created requires the level of effort that Google has done," said Steve Shladover of UC Berkeley's Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology, www.mercurynews.com reported "There's no magic. It's a lot of hard work."

Google will send three prototype self-driving cars to Austin, after representatives from the company tested six of its older models in the city. (See more at: Google to sent three self driving cars to Austin for testing).