Oliver Haslam on August 24, 2017, 12:08 pm

Apple Working On New “PAIL” Self-Driving Shuttle For Its Staff

Apple’s Project Titan was once the biggest thing in tech, and you could not click more than a couple of links around the internet without falling into some sort of self-driving car rabbit hole in which Apple’s move to revolutionize the way we get around was discussed.

That lofty goal has long since been scaled back to mean Apple is instead working on the software side of things, allowing other companies to worry about actually building the car, but that does not mean that moves are not afoot within the corridors of power inside Apple.

A new report out claims that Apple is working on what it calls PAIL, or Palo Alto to Infinite Loop, a self-driving shuttle that will allow staff to move between its old and new campuses with ease. The report, coming out of The New York Times, claims that the shuttle will be based on a car company’s existing van but with Apple self-driving technology built into it.

This mimics what we already heard about Apple’s scaled back plans for autonomous cars, and with the company possessing a license that allows the testing of self-driving cars on local roads, it makes plenty of sense that work would be underway on such a project.

The New York Times also notes that when Apple was still planning on building its own car, there were such ideas as designing a car with spherical wheels rather than the standard circular ones we are familiar with. While this sounds like something that would be immediately dropped during the planning stage, it does go to show that, at least at some point, all ideas were laid on the table no matter how outlandish they may have been.

Alleged photo of Apple’s self-driving test car.

Oh how we would have loved to be in on one of those meetings!

(Source: The New York Times)