Over the past few months, we have had heard rumours of an autonomous Apple car testing in parts of the US for the past few months. Now, a video by MacRumors shows an actual autonomous prototype car driving itself on the freeways of San Francisco.
The video shows a white Lexus RX450h SUV with all the autonomous computer equipment onboard the vehicle. You can see the SUV smoothly driving itself with one of Apple’s employees behind the wheel, just to keep a check.
Apple was initially granted a DMV permit to test autonomous vehicles on the road. A DMV spokesperson said the company had registered three 2015 Lexus RX450h SUVs to be driven by six Apple employees with expertise in autonomous vehicles. An earlier report by Bloomberg also revealed that the car was kitted out with an array of sensors, according to a person who saw the vehicle and provided photos to Bloomberg News. The sensors included Velodyne Lidar Inc.'s top-of-the-range 64-channel lidar, at least two radar devices and a series of cameras.
Apple is reportedly working on providing autonomous driving abilities to the next iteration of CarPlay multimedia units. The move will challenge existing automotive players, like Tesla which already features self-driving “Auto-Pilot” mode in its range of electric cars, while competing aggressively with Google’s Waymo project.
