While there’s not enough evidence to support rumors that Apple is developing its own car, it’s evidently testing its self-driving technology with retrofitted cars. Apple has actually been doing this for quite some time now and has just reported the first car involving its self-driving car. An Apple autonomous vehicle was rear-ended as it merged onto the expressway near the company’s headquarters in Silicon Valley last month.
Apple hasn’t given any detail about its self-driving ambitions. Recent reports suggest that it has at least 5,000 employees working on this project and that it’s developing circuit boards and even a “proprietary chip” for self-driving cars.
An accident report revealed that one of Apple’s Lexus RX 450h self-driving test cars was involved in a crash on August 24th. The car was in autonomous mode at that time when it was merging south on the Lawrence Expressway in Sunnyvale, California. It was merging at less than 1 mile per hour when a 2016 Nissan Leaf going at almost 15 miles per hour rear-ended it.
The accident took place at around 3 pm when the Apple car slowed and waited for a gap in traffic to completely merge on to the expressway. Both vehicles were damaged but nobody was injured. As required by law, a human driver was behind the wheel even though the vehicle was driving itself.
A spokesman for Apple confirmed that the company did file the accident report but did not provide any further details related to the crash.
Filed in . Read more about Self-Driving Cars. Source: reuters