Tim Cook confirms Apple is working on driverless cars

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Apple has been rumoured to be working on driverless cars for years Credit: AFP

Apple's chief executive Tim Cook has confirmed that the iPhone giant is working on self-driving cars for the first time.

The company has long been rumoured to be developing autonomous driving and vehicles fitted with driverless technology have even been seen around the company's California headquarters, but the notoriously secretive company has so far refused to confirm its plans.

Self-driving vehicles are seen as a major opportunity for technology companies, with Google and Uber among those developing the software.

"We’re focusing on autonomous systems," Mr Cook told Bloomberg. "It’s a core technology that we view as very important.

"We sort of see it as the mother of all AI [artificial intelligence] projects. "It’s probably one of the most difficult AI projects actually to work on."

The ambitions of Apple's "Project Titan" changed last year, when the company moved from working on its own car to  developing the self-driving software that would feature in other vehicles. It already has its CarPlay software that features in many modern vehicles and allows cars to easily work with iPhones.

While it has not talked about its plans before, Apple's interest was confirmed earlier this year when it was granted a permit to test the vehicles.

Mr Cook declined to say whether Apple wanted to build its own car. "We’re not really saying from a product point of view what we will do," he said.

Driverless vehicles have gained huge amounts of excitement in Silicon Valley but are years away from being available to consumers. Uber is trialling driverless taxis in Pittsburgh and Arizona, while Waymo, a division of Google parent Alphabet, has racked up millions of miles of testing.

Several tests of the technology are also taking place in the UK.

 

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