Apple's senior vice president Tony Fadell admittedly recalls talking with Apple co-founder Steve Job about the possibility of investing in much bigger gadgets such as a car after the release of iPhone in 2008. Fadell remembers some occasions when they talked about the potential of an iCar.
Talking about brilliance and curiosity combined, count Steve Jobs in. For years, rumors about the possibility of the company to produce their own automobiles have been making rounds on the Internet. The latest one according to the Independent even claimed that Apple has already "committed" to create one and will soon be released in 2019.
The now Nest Labs CEO told Bloomberg that they have indeed thought and talked about an Apple car. "We had a couple of walks," he said.
He reminisced that they had instances of exchanging ideas about design features and even raised and threw hypothetical questions with each other like "If we were to build a car, what would we build? What would a dashboard be? And what would this be? What would seats be? How would you fuel it or power it?"
However, aside from the collapsing automobile industry in the United States that time, they were also more determined to make their then newly released iPhone a mainstream product. "The Detroit auto industry was almost dead, it was fun to kick those ideas around," Fadell said.
After Steve Jobs death four years ago, Detroit has rebounded, and the company pushed closer to releasing the cars. In fact, Apple has been reportedly on a huge hiring campaign of engineers and experts from conventional car producers who are masters in battery and robotics technology to design a car set to go into production in 2020.
"I think you're going to see some dramatic changes in the way we think about these cars and the accessibility in terms of the price points... But we're still seven to 10 years away from a mass switch-over," Fadell said.
