Apple Car would’ve looked like a ‘futuristic van with rounded edges:’ Gurman

Gurman states one source described the interior as making you feel like you were in a ‘contoured bubble’, reflecting the vehicle’s minimalist aesthetic. Despite this stripped-down interior, the Apple Car was optimised for Level 5 self-driving, which is the highest level of automation.

The open cabin layout was designed to comfortably accommodate four passengers, omitting traditional driver controls and interfaces in Apple’s vision of a truly autonomous future. As Gurman explains, “All of the design work had focused on a car meant to have no steering wheel or pedals.”

However, Apple’s vehicle concept underwent multiple iterations before arriving at this “bubble car” design. Gurman notes that “a prior vision of the car looked akin to a 1950s Volkswagen Microbus and was dubbed the ‘Bread Loaf’, while another version ‘looked nearly identical to the 2017 Volkswagen ID Buzz prototype.'”

The 2017 Volkswagen ID Buzz prototype. (Image: Volkswagen)

This latter similarity may have been influenced by “some Apple employees [who] moved to Volkswagen in the mid-2010s” according to Gurman’s reporting.

By 2020, Apple’s self-driving vehicle plans had solidified enough for CEO Tim Cook and COO Jeff Williams to give “a speech at the company’s test track in Arizona to commit to development in 2020,” signaling the company’s dedication to the project at that time.

Ultimately though, Gurman stated in a previous report that Apple’s “hubris” and overly ambitious goal of creating a fully self-driving vehicle with no driver controls proved to be a “mistake” that became too late to course-correct. In his words, “By the time Apple realised their mistake a few years ago, it was too late.”