News

Rumors of Apple Self-Driving Car Reignite after Secret Discussion with Test Facility

Will an Apple Car enter production soon? The Guardian says yes, but others are skeptical. It may have begun testing at a secret location in Concord, CA.

Published

10 years ago

August 18, 2015

Steve Hanley

Apple CarPlay [Source: Apple]

Rumors of a self-driving electric car by Apple are becoming more real these days, especially after the latest document obtained by The Guardian giving signs that Apple has made arrangements with GoMentum Station, a secure and gated facility with 20 miles of paved roads, bridges and underpasses, to utilize their space.

The former World War II naval base is located 40 miles north of Silicon Valley and guarded by the military, making it, officials claim, “the largest secure test facility in the world” for the “testing, validation, and commercialization of connected vehicle (CV) applications and autonomous vehicles (AV) technologies …” Mercedes-Benz and Honda have already carried out experiments with self-driving cars behind its barbed wire fences.

Thanks to a Freedom of Information request filed by The Guardian, we know that in May, engineers from Apple’s secretive Special Project group met with officials from GoMentum Station, after Apple engineer Frank Fearon wrote to the facility, saying, “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].”

“We had to sign a non-disclosure agreement with Apple,” says Randy Iwasaki, executive director of the Contra Costa Transportation Authority, owner of GoMentum Station. He says, “We can’t tell you anything other than they’ve come in and they’re interested. There’s not a lot of vacant space in the Valley if you want to do testing in a secure location. We’re close enough that companies can bring their vehicles north, store them in the Concord area and bring their software and hardware engineers up.”

Apple calls its car making venture Project Titan. The Guardian says it is housed in a nondescript building in Sunnyvale, California, about 4 miles from Apple’s new headquarters in Cupertino. The building was leased in 2014 and subsequently modified by Apple to include several labs and workshop spaces, as well as beefed-up security and access card readers, according to information filed in city permits.

In May, Apple senior vice-president Jeff Williams called a car “the ultimate mobile device” and said that Apple was “exploring a lot of different markets [in which] we think we can make a huge amount of difference”.

The Guardian story appeared on August 14. The next day, the editors of The Verge pooh poohed it, saying, “We still don’t have the smoking gun there will be an actual Apple-branded car on the streets that you and I can buy directly from Apple, just as you would a Tesla. There are a number of other possibilities that are still in the running — Apple could want to build a car platform, for instance, just as Google seems to be doing, without making or selling cars itself. Or it could be developing technologies that it can license and sell to existing automakers.”

Skepticism from The Verge centers on the fact that it normally takes 5 years for an established car company to bring an entirely new car to market. It thinks for a company like Apple, which has never built a car before, the time could be a lot longer.

Rumors about an Apple Car only began to surface a year or so ago and consist mostly of reports that Apple is busy recruiting engineers from Tesla and the former A123 battery company. The Verge thinks that if Apple is working on building a car, it will be 2020 at the earliest before it goes into production.

>>>>> MUST SEE: [VIDEO] Hilarious ‘Apple Car’ Parody

Google, Tesla, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and several other car makers have been issued permits by the California department of motor vehicles to test self-driving cars on the state’s public roads. But that process requires disclosing technical and commercial details, something that the notoriously secretive Apple might not want.

Tesla apparently wanted key personnel to tour GoMentum Station in April, but armed soldiers at the base refused entry to foreign born workers and a manager who would not divulge his social security number. “At this point, I’ll retract our interest in this test site until the process is worked out,” the manager said in an email to GoMentum Station’s Jack Hall, according to The Guardian.

No company on Earth is as secretive about its future plans as Apple. The only thing we know for sure about the supposed Apple Car is that we don’t know very much about it at all.

News

Tesla Cybercab sightings on public roads are becoming more frequent

After it was unveiled a year ago by Tesla, the company has made some pretty drastic jumps in progress in terms of the Cybercab, but a recent development has truly pushed fans of the company to think it is probably going to be available soon.

Published

3 hours ago

November 6, 2025

Joey Klender

Credit: Petersen Museum

Tesla Cybercab sightings on public roads are becoming much more frequent, and they all are pointing to one thing: imminent production.

The Tesla Cybercab is the company’s vehicle developed for fully autonomous travel, as it will be manufactured without a steering wheel or pedals, according to CEO Elon Musk.

Tesla Robotaxi Cybercab: Seats, price, special features, release date, and more

Last week, we reported on the first Cybercab sighting when the vehicle was finally being tested on public roads. The spotting was not a one-time deal, as we are now seeing many more sightings on public roads:

Saw it the other day pic.twitter.com/uv0geR6GIh
— Shareef Mahmoud (@saltyyshareef) November 6, 2025

The first spotting was in Palo Alto, just a few blocks from Tesla’s Engineering Headquarters in Los Altos. This second sighting appears to be relatively close to that first spotting, and it seems unlikely Tesla would be putting it on roads much further than that.

The public on-road testing of the Cybercab marks a major milestone in the entire project for Tesla. These early sightings and testing phases are usually followed by a lot of speculation about when the vehicle could end up in the hands of customers.

However, Tesla has already put a definitive date on when Cybercab production will begin, as Elon Musk said during the Q3 Earnings Call that it would roll off production lines in Q2 of next year.

But the speculation regarding the Cybercab is slightly different than other vehicles because Tesla has been developing it for fully autonomous travel; it’s not meant to be driven by humans but instead by software and the company’s Full Self-Driving suite.

Despite the vehicle being spotted with a steering wheel and pedals in the recent sightings, Musk has maintained that the Cybercab will not be developed with typical controls for a human. He recently confirmed this, and it does not seem the company is willing to veer too much from its plans for an autonomous car.

News

Tesla Model Y Performance is rapidly moving toward customer deliveries

New drone images from noted drone operator and Gigafactory Texas observer Joe Tegtmeyer show Tesla is moving forward quickly in terms of its progress in producing the new Model Y Performance.

Published

4 hours ago

November 6, 2025

Joey Klender

Credit: Tesla

Tesla has rapidly progressed in the production of its most anticipated Model Y trim level: the Model Y Performance.

New drone images from noted drone operator and Gigafactory Texas observer Joe Tegtmeyer show Tesla is moving forward quickly in terms of its progress in producing the new Model Y Performance.

The vehicle is being spotted more frequently at the factory located just outside of Austin, with what appears to be the first units rolling out to outbound lots:

In case you missed the news, Giga Texas has begun Model Y Performance production. Now all variants of the Model Y (except the China-only YL) are built in Texas. pic.twitter.com/AOOB9jtLwN
— Joe Tegtmeyer 🚀 🤠🛸😎 (@JoeTegtmeyer) November 6, 2025

In the United States, Tesla unveiled the Model Y Performance on September 30, the newest iteration of the fastest trim level of the best-selling car in the world for the past two years. It was launched on the very last day of the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit in the United States.

It featured a handful of performance improvements, including a 0-60 MPH acceleration rate of 3.3 seconds, a trim from the 3.5 seconds the 2025 version offered.

Additionally, the range has gone from 277 miles to 308 miles, a notable improvement in terms of how far it can travel on a charge.

There are also a handful of hardware changes that Tesla made to improve its aerodynamic performance, which all likely can be attributed to the boost in speed and acceleration, as well as range.

The vehicle was initially launched in Europe, which was not surprising, especially as Tesla was testing the new Performance trim at the famed Nurburgring in Germany.

Deliveries are currently slated for late November, but some orders are getting projections of mid-December for their Model Y Performance, which would help Tesla bolster its end-of-year delivery figures and follow up on an extremely bullish finish to Q3, which was the company’s strongest performance in history.

Elon Musk

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey endorses Elon Musk Tesla pay package

Dorsey framed the pay package as an engineering and governance crossroads for Tesla.

Published

5 hours ago

November 6, 2025

Simon Alvarez

Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey has publicly backed Elon Musk’s leadership ahead of Tesla’s pivotal shareholder vote, which is expected to be decided later today at the company’s 2025 annual meeting.

Dorsey framed the pay package as an engineering and governance crossroads for Tesla.

Dorsey’s public nod framed as an engineering defense of Musk

In a post on X, Dorsey weighed in on Tesla’s post about being in a “critical inflection point.” As per the Twitter-co-founder, the vote on Musk’s 2025 performance award is not about compensation. Instead, it’s about ensuring the path for the company’s engineering in the coming years.

“This is not about compensation. it’s about ensuring a principled (and exciting!) engineering approach to the company’s future,” Dorsey wrote on his post, later stating that users of Cash app with TSLA shares would be able to vote for the CEO’s proposed 2025 performance award.

Elon Musk appreciated Dorsey’s endorsement, responding to the Twitter co-founder’s post with a heart emoji. Musk has been pretty thankful for the support for is fellow tech executives, also thanking Michael Dell recently, who also advocated for its proposed 2025 performance award.

❤️— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 6, 2025

Musk’s support

While Elon Musk’s 2025 performance award has received opposition from proxy advisors such as Glass Lewis and ISS, it has received quite a lot of support from longtime bulls such as ARK Invest, and, more recently, Schwab Asset Management following calls from TSLA retail shareholders.

“Schwab Asset Management’s approach to voting on proxy matters is thorough and deliberate. We utilize a structured process that focuses on protecting and promoting shareholder value. We apply our own internal guidelines and do not rely on recommendations from Glass Lewis or ISS. In accordance with this process, Schwab Asset Management intends to vote in favor of the 2025 CEO performance award proposal. We firmly believe that supporting this proposal aligns both management and shareholder interests, ensuring the best outcome for all parties involved,” Charles Schwab told Teslarati.