Apple Too is Working on Having its Own Electric Car, says Wallstreet Journal

"Project Titan," as it's known internally within the Apple company, is an all-electric vehicle that apparently resembles a minivan" in its current iteration and has a team of several hundred people working on it according to a report from The Wallstreet Journal. But, the report also cautions thatthat it'd be several years at least before Titan could be ready for production, and that it could also even end up being more of a platform for testing other products and technologies related to mobility that Apple is working on like CarPlay, than an actual market-ready vehicle in itself.

The report claims that Tim Cook signed off on Titan nearly a year ago by giving Steve Zadesky, an Apple executive who was a former engineer at Ford, a team of 1,000 personnel from across a variety of departments in the company to work on the project. In recent months, the report continues, Apple staff have visited contract manufacturers that could potentially build a car or supply components of a car on the company's behalf. Among of the companies named is Magna Steyr, which has built cars for Mercedes and BMW in the past, among others.

Recently, a camera-mounted van spotted driving around the Bay Area registered as leased to Apple was reported by Claycord. A Dodge Caravan with a four-camera rig mounted on the roof, the mystery vehicle may be a self-driving test vehicle, a technology analyst named Rob Enderle told CBS' 5KPIX. Known Apple tipster MacRumors has also shown a picture of another Apple-registered driving around the San Francisco Bay Area at its website.

Last year, Cook [via Business Insider] teased, "There are products that we're working on that no one knows about, that haven't been rumored about yet. And part of some of those are going to come out and be blow-away, probably." Steve Jobs before he died said "that if he had more energy, he would have liked to take on Detroit with an Apple car."