Drive.ai: Think An Apple Car Won't Happen? Well, a Recent Investment Says Otherwise

Apple has applied the finishing touches on its acquisition of Drive.ai, a Texas-based mobility startup that focused on self-driving cars. So we must ask: is this another attempt from Apple to get a piece of the autonomous vehicle pie before it's too late and everybody has fully jumped the bandwagon? It could very well be, especially since the company has been strongly linked with such a move for many years now.The Apple car saga started to catch contour in 2013, when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had a chat with the New York Times and mentioned that he "would have liked to take on Detroit with an Apple car." From there on, Pandora's box was open and rumors about an Apple car started spreading on the internet like wildfire. First, an Apple employee anonymously sent an email to Business Insider, saying that the company is working on a product that would "give Tesla a run for its money." So, the Apple car or Apple iCar how many journalists liked to speculatively call it, would be an all-electric vehicle. Then the Project Titan name popped up, together with a deadline: 2019. Subsequently, Apple started a poaching campaign aimed at bringing know-how from the likes of Tesla, GM, Mercedes-Benz, Autoliv, and even Google. Amassed together with Apple's own roster of employees assigned to the project, the total number of people involved in the project quickly rose to around 1,000.