Rumor: Apple Car could be available as early as 2020

You could have an Apple Car as early as 2020.

According to a Bloomberg article, Apple is pushing its development team to have the car in production in that time frame, albeit Apple has yet to comment on the story and sources have remained anonymous.

Apple Car has all but pushed Apple Watch out of the headlines in the last two weeks. Successive reports from mainstream outlets have claimed Apple has a team as large as a thousand people working on the project, that it is codenamed “Titan,” and that Apple has hired any number of people from the automotive industry.

On Thursday, it was discovered that Apple has been hiring battery experts from at least one company, A123 Systems. That company has sued Apple over the nature of its poaching. Apple has also apparently been targeting battery experts at LG, Samsung, Panasonic, Toshiba, and Johnson Controls.

A 2020 timeline would be aggressive, according to traditional metrics. The established auto industry typicality takes 7-10 years to develop a new car, and few of those are started from scratch.

Apple is starting from the ground up—even if Apple started this project 2 or 3 years ago, that represents a development time of 7-8 years. Apple could have started even earlier, of course, but it would still be quite the achievement to get a car into production so swiftly.

Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.

Via The Mac Observer and Bloomberg