A new report from The Guardian reveals that Apple is in fact working on a self-driving car project in Silicon Valley, and has already began scouting for secure locations in the area to conduct testing. Documents obtained by the news agency reveal that Apple’s car project, dubbed Project Titan, may be further along than many previously suspected.
The report reveals that engineers from a secret Special Project group within Apple met with officials from GoMentum Station, a former naval base near San Francisco that is being transformed to serve specifically as a testing ground for autonomous vehicles. The correspondence obtained by the Guardian cites a communication from an Apple engineer, Frank Fearon, to the base, stating that the company would “like to get an understanding of timing and availability for the space, and how we would need to coordinate around other parties who would be using [it].”
An old naval weapons station, GoMentum Station is a high-security facility still guarded by the U.S.
military with 20 miles of paved highways and city streets that make it particularly well-suited to the “testing validation and commercialization of connected vehicle (CV) applications and autonomous vehicles (AV) technologies to define the next generation of transportation network infrastructure,” according to officials. The facility has already been used by other car manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz and Honda to carry out experiments with self-driving cars.
