Apple’s self-driving electric car, complete with revolutionary battery, slated for reveal in 2024
3 min readApple is planning on revealing its long-awaited self-driving car in 2024, following years of uncertainty and setbacks, according to reports.
The tech giant is working on an autonomous car that consumers can buy, Reuters has claimed, in contrast to efforts from rivals including Google to develop driverless vehicles for use in ride-hailing services.
A new battery design that could “radically” lower the cost of batteries and increase the car’s range (the distance it’s able to safely travel before needing recharging), according to people close to the project.
The car’s battery will reportedly sport a unique ‘monocell’ design that “bulks up the individual cells in the battery and frees up space inside the battery pack by eliminating pouches and modules that hold battery materials”, which could give the car a potentially longer range than current electric vehicles.
Apple is also allegedly examining a chemistry for the battery called LFP (lithium iron phosphate), which is inherently less likely to overheat and is thus safer than other types of lithium-ion batteries.
”It’s next level,” a person familiar with the project said. “Like the first time you saw the iPhone.”
Years of setbacks
Tim Cook, Apple‘s chief executive, confirmed the company was developing software for autonomous vehicles in June 2017, but little else definitive is known about the highly secretive plans, known under the name Project Titan.
Apple is believed to have begun work on the project back in 2014, hiring significant figures from automotive companies including Ford, Tesla and Volkswagan.
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It was reported to have given the car division until the end of 2017 to prove the viability of its self-driving system, following internal disagreements over the initiative’s direction and supply chain difficulties.
Doug Fields, a former lead engineer at Tesla and a former Apple employee, was re-hired in 2018 to reportedly work alongside former colleague Bob Mansfield.
“If there is one company on the planet that has the resources to do that, it’s probably Apple. But at the same time, it’s not a cellphone,” a person who worked on Project Titan told Reuters.
Potential delays
While the company is hoping to make an official announcement by 2024, coronavirus-related delays mean that production could be delayed until 2025 or later, two people who know Apple’s plans warned.
A third-party manufacturing partner is likely to shoulder the burden of assembling the vehicle and despite the efforts made to date, it’s still possible that Apple may choose to scrap its ambitions for a branded car entirely and boil the project down to an autonomous driving system for use in cars made by established automakers, another person is reported as saying.
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An Apple car may contain multiple LiDAR (light-detection and ranging technology) sensors for measuring distances between the vehicle and surrounding objects, some of which may be built on the foundations of the LiDAR scanners present in the iPad Pro and iPhone 12 Pro that Apple released earlier this year.
Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has a long history of mostly-correct Apple predictions, claimed the company was working towards a 2023 launch date back in 2018, saying the product stands to revolutionise the motoring industry in the same way the iPhone redefined expectations of mobile phones.
