Apple has long been rumored to be working on an electric self-driving car. The tech giant has been caught poaching experts from the automotive industry, with the apparent goal of taking on fellow Silicon Valley darling Tesla. Today, those rumors were furthered by the discovery that Apple has been working to find a suitable location to test its apparent self-driving car project.
The Guardian reports that a public records request reveals that the Cupertino tech company has been negotiating with GoMentum Station, a company that operates a 2100-acre former naval base outside San Francisco that’s built to allow high-security testing of autonomous vehicles in highly-realistic conditions simulating real-world driving environments.
Codenamed “Project Titan,” Apple’s apparent autonomous car project has long been the subject of auto industry rumor and speculation, but The Guardian reports this is the first time the project’s existence has been confirmed in internal Apple documents. The documents viewed by The Guardian indicate that Apple engineer Frank Fearon has been in communication with GoMentum Station to secure “an understanding of timing and availability for the space, and how we would need to coordinate around other parties who would be using [it].” An executive director of the company that owns GoMentum station confirmed to The Guardian that Apple has expressed interest in testing at the site, and that GoMentum has signed a non-disclosure agreement with Apple.
Other companies interested in autonomous vehicles, including competitor Google, have already visited GoMentum Station’s facilities, which feature simulated roadways that include highway overpasses, railway crossings, tunnels, and even cattle grids, the paper reports. So far, only Honda has signed a memorandum of understanding with the company, paying $250,000 to securely test self-driving versions of the Acura RLX at GoMentum’s facility.
If the documents viewed by The Guardian are legitimate, the tech giant’s alleged interest in working with GoMentum is true to character: Apple is notoriously tight-lipped and secretive about upcoming projects, and testing at GoMentum’s private facilities would allow Apple to get real-world data without submitting the publicly disclosed technical and market details required to get a self-driving car testing permit in the state of California.
Just how secure is GoMentum’s facility? The Guardian reports that armed guards at the testing grounds refused entry to foreign-born Tesla employees scouting the location for potential self-driving car testing. GoMentum refers to its facility as “the largest secure test facility in the world” for the “testing validation and commercialization of connected vehicle (CV) applications and autonomous vehicles (AV) technologies to define the next generation of transportation network infrastructure.”
Given this latest discovery, and in light of Apple senior VP Jeff Williams’s recent comment that cars are “the ultimate mobile device,” it sure sounds like the Cupertino tech company is interested in expanding into the automobile industry.
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