Apple eyeing 2024 deadline for first self-driven battery car

Apple is aiming to come up with a self-driven car equipped
with a breakthrough battery technology by 2024, Reuters reported on Monday citing
sources.

The cell phone manufacturer has been engaged in its bid to
make a self-driving car since 2014, under what it called Project Titan. But its
efforts petered out midway, till return of Doug Field, a former Apple and Tesla
employee, in 2018, who fired 190 employees from the team, and got things started again. 

Apple’s goal of building a personal vehicle for the mass
market contrasts with rivals such as Alphabet Inc’s Waymo, which has built robo-taxis
to carry passengers for a driverless ride-hailing service, Reuters wrote.

According to the sources cited in the report, Apple is
working on a battery design that could “radically” reduce the cost of batteries
and increase the vehicle’s range.

 The sources spoke of
car manufacturing as such a hefty undertaking that only companies
with deep pockets like Apple could do it. But even with billions of dollar
behind it, the venture is not proving to be cake-walk for Apple.

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“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,” said a person who worked on Project Titan.

Another non-edge that the firm has is that it has never made
cars before, and faces daunting prospects in the crowded automobile market.

As Reuters pointed out “it took Elon Musk’s Tesla 17 years before
it finally turned a sustained profit making cars”.

It is not yet revealed who will manufacture or assemble the
Apple cars, but according to the report, Apple may be in talks with outside
firms to develop lidar sensors for its cars for a three-dimension view of the
road.

Apple’s iPhone 12 Pro and iPad Pro models released this year
both feature lidar sensors.

“As for the car’s battery, Apple plans to use 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,” Reuters wrote quoting a source.

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”It’s next level,” the person said. “Like the first time you
saw the iPhone.”