Rumours of an Apple iCar is getting fans excited!
There’s nothing quite as trendy as a product with a lowercase ‘i’ at the beginning of its name, could we be seeing an Apple iCar in the near future?
Apple certainly revolutionized the music industry with its personal MP3 players in the form of the iPod. Some would say the beginning of the ‘Smartphone’ era began with the first Apple iPhone, could the iCar have a similar impact on the motoring industry?
The innovative tech company sparked these rumours when it registered certain domain names, such as apple.car, apple.cars and apple.auto. Various reports over the last few months have also suggested that Apple is secretly developing its own automobile. Could the registration of these domain names suggest it is about to go public with its plans?
The initial rumours about a potential iCar began with reports from the site ‘MacRumors’, saying that,
“Apple has aggressively recruited engineers and other talent from Tesla, Ford, GM, Samsung, A123 Systems, Nvidia and elsewhere to work on the rumoured ‘Apple Car’ project, which has allegedly been called ‘Project Titan’ internally.”
“Electric motorcycle start-up, Mission Motors, even ceased operations after losing employees to Apple.”
There is so much interest that fans have drawn up designs of what they think the iCar will look like. Richard O’Brien, head of communications at the Institute of the Motor Industry, stated that he was looking forward to the real thing and that he would probably be an early customer!
“I would have thought the design would be completely different to any normal car, a proper disruptive design,” he said.
“I love Apple products and I’m quite excited about it. I’d quite like an electric car, given what I know about them now and how cheap they are to run. And if it goes with the iPhone and iPad …”
One of the main problems that many electric vehicles face, is that of the car’s driving range. Basically how far the car can drive before needing to recharge, which for most electric cars, is rather limited. This will be one of the major issues that the iCar will have to overcome, in order to really get the mass appeal of its previous products.
And Mr O’Brien said experiences with early iPhones might put some people off.
“There are constant complaints that iPhone batteries don’t last very long and you have to have them attached to the mains so much they might as well be a landline,” he said. “But they have addressed that in the iPhone 6.”
It will be interesting to see when Apple finally make its plans public!
Source: IOL