The Curious Case of Apple’s Supposed Self-Driving Car

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Bay Area citizens are accustomed to seeing Google’s proudly labeled self-driving cars and maps vehicles cruising down the streets. But concern and curiosity arose early this week when reports of unlabeled, tech-adorned, seemingly self-driving vans began flooding in—and at least one belongs to Apple.

Drivers spotted an unlabeled Dodge minivan with a variety of camera gear strapped on top in the Clayton-Concord area of California, the blog Claycord reports. In the comments of the post, readers confirmed seeing this and similar vehicles elsewhere in the East Bay and in San Francisco. The mini-van features a white X-shaped frame on its roof racks, with circular black recesses at each corner that look to be cameras. Local CBS affiliate KPIX confirmed with the DMV that the Dodge minivan’s license plate is registered to Apple, creating a flurry of speculation that this could be Apple’s prototype self-driving car.

Apple has a demonstrated interest in the car space. Its in-dash infotainment system CarPlay not only offers Siri’s hands-free voice control while you drive, it creates a more seamless iOS experience in the car by linking your phone to its touchscreen display. But thus far, Apple has left the car part of the equation strictly in automakers’ hands—it doesn’t even have a permit for testing self-driving vehicles in California yet. Are there any signs Apple could be working on more advanced car technologies? Actually, yes.

If Apple had any serious ambitions in the space, it would have brought key roboticists on board—machine vision is a key part of a driverless car system. And it has. In 2013, Apple hired roboticist John Morrell from Yale. Morrell, a leading force in the development of the Segway who’d also been doing research in how robots interact with humans, was slated to head Yale’s new Center for Engineering Innovation & Design before Apple snatched him up. Apple also currently has several job openings for 3D perception/computer vision algorithm engineers who will work on “exciting technologies for future Apple products.” This position prefers a PhD in computer vision, robotics, or machine learning.

But Apple dabbles in a lot of things that may or may not ever end up as a consumer product (Apple television, anyone?). And last quarter it posted the greatest profit in its history, $18 billion. Apple has money to burn on exploring new technologies.

As a kind of skunkworks exercise, there’s relatively little cost and much PR to gain for Apple to invest in something like this, Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and WIRED’s 2012 cover story on driverless cars), said of these self-driving car reports.

Dhruv Batra, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech’s Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and head of its Machine Learning and Perception Group, took a look at the gear atop the van to see if it matched the requirements of a self-driving vehicle. A self-driving car would need to have: GPS (to localize its position on a map); LiDAR (for identifying obstacles and pedestrians); cameras (for lane detection and further pedestrian identification); and an accelerometer or perhaps a full Inertial Measurement Unit. The van in the photos has roughly 12 cameras situated around the racks’ perimeter, as well as a spinning cylinder situated at the front and back of the van that look like Velodyne LiDARs, Batra said. These are used to create a point cloud of the environment surrounding the vehicle.

Based on this gear, Batra says the car does have the necessary equipment to be a self-driving vehicle (also visible in the images are dual disc-shaped antennas affixed to the roof, and a sensor that hangs down over the rear wheel, but Batra didn’t comment on these). However, self-driving cars don’t necessarily look like techified robo-vehicles on the outside: CMU’s self-driving Cadillac SRX looks no different than any other car on the road.

However, there’s very little tying this to Apple besides the license plate on the car. For a brand that uses umbrella companies for so much of its private dealings, why leave its name tied to the van? Perhaps it is indeed a move to get Apple buzz in an area where Apple was lacking in buzz. Or perhaps it’s some sort of clever misdirection—“Hey everyone, look over here at this maybe thing we’re working on, while we’re actually working on something else!”

My cynical mind can’t help but wonder if this is someone’s idea of a prank. For example, registering the car under Apple’s name is an inexpensive and playful way for a clever start-up to gain some publicity. Maybe it’s an academic project where one of the students had some fun with the DMV forms? I reached out to Stanford about its autonomous vehicle program (CARS) and the people there said they have no idea about these blue minivans. So, no. Stanford’s not behind it. And neither is Carnegie Mellon University, whose self driving car is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dodge also confirmed to me that, despite it being a Dodge vehicle, the company has nothing to do with this purported self-driving car.

But there are other explanations for the vehicle.

There’s overwhelming evidence that this is just a mapping vehicle, particularly based on the number of cameras on board. Google’s newest Street View vehicles, for example, feature 15 5-megapixel CMOS sensors for capturing their surroundings, and those vehicles have been widely successful in accurately capturing the world’s streets and signage. Apple Maps has vastly improved since its disastrous debut, but it could still certainly benefit from Street View-like tech.

Another possibility, considering the angle of the cameras positioned on the car and the LiDAR sensors, as one commenter on the original report pointed out, the vehicle could be nothing more than a company surveying local roads.

Apple hasn’t yet commented on reports that it is developing self-driving car technology. But the company certainly has the means—technological and monetary—to do so, and it’s clear that self driving cars are the way of the future. With that in mind, the idea that Apple could be playing with its own brand of self-driving car smarts doesn’t sound far-fetched at all. It sounds like Apple.