A letter to federal traffic regulators on its automated vehicle policy.

The Verge, 12-3-2016 -- Apple, which has been infuriatingly secretive about it’s efforts to build a self-driving car, has sent the strongest hint yet about its so-called Project Titan. In a letter submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the tech giant states that it is “investing heavily in the study of machine learning and automation, and is excited about the potential of automated systems in many areas, including transportation.”

The letter is Apple’s official comment on the federal government’s automated vehicle guidelines, released last September, which has already drawn feedback from many companies working on autonomous cars like Google and Ford. And speaking of Ford, Apple’s letter is signed by a man named Steven Kenner, the company’s head of product integrity who up until very recently was the global director of automotive safety at Ford.

Apple has been working on Project Titan for several years, but has never formally acknowledged it. Lately, the autonomous car project seems to be in flux. Recent reporting suggests that the company is no longer attempting to build its own electric car to compete with companies like Tesla, but is instead focused on developing self-driving software it can deploy in partnership with existing carmakers. 

Read the rest of the story HERE.

Guardian -- Apple is building a self-driving car in Silicon Valley, and is scouting for secure locations in the San Francisco Bay area to test it, the Guardian has learned. Documents show the oft-rumoured Apple car project appears to be further along than many suspected.

In May, engineers from Apple’s secretive Special Project group met with officials from GoMentum Station, a 2,100-acre former naval base near San Francisco that is being turned into a high-security testing ground for autonomous vehicles.

In correspondence obtained by the Guardian under a public records act request, Apple engineer Frank Fearon wrote: “We would ... like to get an understanding of timing and availability for the space, and how we would need to coordinate around other parties who would be using [it].”

Apple declined to comment.

GoMentum Station is on the old Concord naval weapons station, a disused second world war-era facility with 20 miles of paved highways and city streets. The base is closed to the public and guarded by the military, making it, officials claim, “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.” Mercedes-Benz and Honda have already carried out experiments with self-driving cars behind its barbed-wire fences.

This security is bound to appeal to Apple, which has hundreds of engineers quietly working on automotive technologies in an anonymous office building in Sunnyvale, four miles from its main campus in Cupertino. Details of the project are still unknown but it seems that Apple has a self-driving car almost ready for the road. In late May, Jack Hall, program manager for autonomous vehicles at GoMentum Station, wrote to Fearon to postpone a tour of the facility but noted: “We would still like to meet in order to keep everything moving and to meet your testing schedule.”

Apple has been rumoured to be working on a self-driving electric car, codenamed Project Titan, but this is the first time its existence has been documented. In May, Apple senior vice-president Jeff Williams called the car “the ultimate mobile device” and said that Apple was “exploring a lot of different markets ... [in which] we think we can make a huge amount of difference”.

Read the rest of the story here: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/14/apple-self-driving-car-project-titan-sooner-than-expected