Apple sat down with the California Department of Motor Vehicles this summer to talk about its autonomous vehicles using California’s roads.
The Guardian obtained documents detailing the content of the meeting and the participants, facts it reported in a story early Friday. The DMV has now confirmed that the meeting took place.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1806244,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,dev,mobile,","session":"D"}']The Guardian says it obtained documents stating that Apple senior legal counsel Mike Maletic had an hour-long meeting on August 17 with the DMV’s self-driving car experts, Bernard Soriano and Stephanie Dougherty. Soriano and Dougherty are co-sponsors of California’s autonomous vehicle regulation project.
The Wall Street Journal reported in February that Apple already had “hundreds of employees” working on its autonomous car project, which CEO Tim Cook apparently green-lit a year ago. The project — dubbed “Titan” — could end up involving as many as 1,000 Apple employees, said the WSJ, citing sources familiar with the project.
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Apple has been tight-lipped about the project in the face of growing evidence that the company is well down the road to building such a car. CEO Tim Cook was recently asked by Stephen Colbert on the Late Show if Apple is in fact working on an autonomous car, but Cook predictably dodged the question.
A mid-August report in the Guardian said Apple engineers met in May with officials from GoMentum Station, a 2,100-acre former naval base near San Francisco that is now used as a testing ground for autonomous and connected vehicles.
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