You could have studied literally thousands of Apple patents, you could have counted the permits it's had to be granted, or could just have waited for Airbnb to show us that Apple really, truly, was working on an Apple Car.
Maybe today "Apple Car" keeps getting autocompleted to "Apple Card," but you know the car was a real thing. Apple still refuses to say a word, yet there's never been a doubt that Apple Car existed. Not since about 2012 when AppleInsider's Daniel Eran Dilger saw the signs and detailed the reasons why Apple had to be doing this.
Flash forward to now, when the project has been abandoned and still Apple will not say a word about the Apple Car. But it doesn't need to, since Airbnb has spilled the beans in a new hire's biography.
You can just imagine Tim Cook choking over a sandwich in Apple Park as he reads that Airbnb has a new Chief Technology Officer. That new CTO is Ahmad Al-Dahle, and perhaps Cook might have started thinking good for him, good to see an ex-Apple person do well.
But then comes the inevitable description of the new guy's history. "In 2014, Ahmad created and led Apple's autonomous technology group, responsible for developing the core AI systems for the company's self-driving car project," says Airbnb's email to its staff, as spotted by TechRadar.
If you squint, you might just make out that this is a drawing of a car — image credit: Apple
That email is of course the usual glowing hype about a new hire, and typically they're written by the person themselves. But it's a fair bet that this didn't happen this time, because Ahmad Al-Dahle has written about his new job on LinkedIn — and only tangentially referred to Apple.
His LinkedIn page lists that he worked in the Special Projects Group and Imaging & Sensing Technology Group at Apple for a total of close to 17 years. But his description of moving to Airbnb talks instead about the great years he says he subsequently had at Meta.
Although right at the end, long after you have to click the "More" button to see it, he does throw in one thing. "Steve Jobs once said that technology alone is not enough," wrote Al-Dahle, "It's technology married with the humanities that makes our hearts sing."
So probably someone else at Airbnb wrote that description, someone who perhaps never signed an Apple NDA.
Still, that's it. Over a decade of work, more than billion dollars spent, and the secret is blown by another company. Airbnb also revealed that Al-Dahle worked on the iPhone, two years before it was launched, and then also the first Apple Watch.
It's an amusing way for the Apple Car to be confirmed, but to be fair, it's not as if Apple's secrecy was ever very effective.
Draw you a picture
Since that piece about Apple and cars by our own Daniel Eran Dilger, there seriously have been countless patents applied for by Apple, and just about as many granted. When the Apple Vision Pro was finally revealed, we realised that patents for that had been hiding in plain sight for years.
It was the same with the Apple Car, but if anything, Apple made those patents more obvious. Some included actual drawings of cars.
But if you ever thought that drawings of cars, descriptions of suspension, and detailed reports on turn signals could just be being taken out of context, there were those permits, too.
You can't try out self-driving cars without a permit, and in 2017, Apple got its first ones for driving in 2017. By May 2024, Apple had permits for over 200 drivers on the project, although in October that year it asked for them all to be cancelled.
Detail from the permit Apple has to have in order to test self-driving cars.
That was one of the first signs that it was true, Apple was abandoning this project it had never admitted to working on. To this day Apple hasn't admitted anything, but that hasn't stopped people saying this is Apple's worst failure since the somewhat smaller scale AirPower.
There's failure and there's failure
Just as the industry at least used to believe Apple was behind on AI, so its abandoning of a billion-dollar Apple Car project has been seen as a failure.
It is. Apple tried to make a car and it definitely failed.
So has everyone else. Give it a few more minutes and Elon Musk will unquestionably promise fully self-driving Tesla cars next year, or in five years, or something like that.
You can set your watch by him saying that. You just can't set your calendar by it happening on his or any other schedule.
Fully self-driving cars are still so far away from production that the courts might even settle the lawsuits against Elon Musk first. He currently faces litigation over everything from misleading advertising, to wrongful death.
Compare that to Apple, which has faced a lawsuit from the Department of Justice that touches on CarPlay antitrust issues. That's all.
Except it's also interesting that this all gets compared to AI, because it is expressly because of the Apple Car that Apple has done what it has with Apple Intelligence.
We will still benefit from Apple Car
No one is going to get to drive an Apple Car, but absolutely every Apple user is going to benefit from that project — and already is. Apple spent billions of dollars on the car, but that was research into everything from AI to materials.
We will never know whether, say, vapor chamber cooling came out of a camshaft design, but there is no question that this research is improving both hardware and software. CarPlay Ultra did not come out of nowhere.
To take one single example, self-driving cars must represent the harshest environment for AI. They have to have total, and instant recognition of their environment — every possible sensor constantly feeding details to the carOS system or whatever it would have been called.
How much of CarPlay came from Apple Car research?
That system, and the processors throughout the sensors, must timeslice extraordinarily quickly to ensure it has all the data needed to drive safely. There can't be the Trolley Problem here: if the car sees it could either kill one person or several, it shouldn't choose, it should brake or kill the driver who is supposed to be paying attention, not the innocents who happened to be nearby.
That work to design faster processors, and to optimize software where no accident can ever be allowed, it all improves all Apple devices as a whole, over time. Apple doesn't have to roll out a feature and say "we started this technology with the Apple Car" for it to be clear.
It's true, though, that Ahmad Al-Dahle will not be involved. It isn't clear what he will be doing at Airbnb, at least after he's emailed Tim Cook to say "my bad."
