Apple's Self-Driving Car May Hit Market In 2024. Check Details

The iPhone maker's strategy is focused on a new battery design that could "drastically" cut down the cost of batteries and increase the vehicle's range.

(Representative Image/ Getty)

If the development remains on track, then the iPhone maker Apple Inc’s self-driving car technology is likely to hit the market by 2024. The company is aiming to produce a passenger vehicle that could include its own breakthrough battery technology, as per the news agency Reuters. What’s the project all about? The company’s automotive efforts, known as Project Titan, didn’t took off as expected since 2014 when it first started to design its own vehicle. It went to the extent of withdrawing the effort to focus on software and reassessed its goals. The project kicked off again after Doug Field, an Apple veteran who had worked at Tesla Inc, joined the project in 2018 and laid off 190 people from the team in 2019. Since then, Apple has made significant development and aims to build a vehicle for consumers. The Apple's strategy is focused on a new battery design that could "drastically" cut down the cost of batteries and increase the vehicle's range, as per report. Making a vehicle represents a supply chain challenge even for Apple, a company with deep pockets that makes hundreds of millions of electronics products each year with parts from around the world, but has never made a car. Who are its competitors? The Apple plan to build a personal vehicle for the mass market will see rivals such as Alphabet Inc's Waymo, which has built robo-taxis to carry passengers for a driverless ride-hailing service. It took Elon Musk's Tesla 17 years before it finally turned a sustained profit making cars. It is still not known who would assemble an Apple-branded car, but the company might rely on a manufacturing partner to build vehicles. However, some experts believe that Apple's plans might be hit due to pandemic-related delays pushing the start of production into 2025 or beyond.