Well, well, well. It looks like all the hullabaloo about Apple building a self-driving car was not all just hot air. UK's The Guardian has learnt that Apple is scouting for secure locations in the San Francisco Bay area to test the car. As we reported earlier, there are also rumours that the BMW i3 (pictured above) could be the preferred model for this self-driving car project.
In a correspondence obtained by The Guardian, under a public records act request, Apple engineer Frank Fearon wrote, "we 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]."
This details that engineers from Apple's secretive Special Project (aka Project Titan) met with officials from GoMentum Station, a 2,100-acre former naval base near San Francisco, that is being turned into maximum security testing area for autonomous vehicles.
According to the publication, GoMentum Station is located on the old Concord naval weapons station, which is a decommissioned second world war-era facility that has approximately 30 km of paved highways and city streets.
Apparently, officials claim that the base is closed to the public and guarded by the military, making it "the largest secure test facility in the world" for the "testing validation and commercialisation of connected vehicle (CV) and autonomous vehicle (AV) technologies to define the next-generation or transportation network infrastructure."
It's said that Mercedes-Benz and Honda have already carried out experiments with self-driving cars behind these barbed-wire fences. Google has been really going at it too, with their version of self driving cars as well.
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