Seems odd to me that Apple would invest in developing a car instead of just focusing on the in-vehicle interface device. Then again, Apple has a long history of wanting absolute control over form factor, so they might believe their better served building the whole car than just one device that's used in it.
It would be the one car with privacy protections
Yep because them and their ilk created the issue now you need to buy their solution. Meanwhile your bog standard no frills 2010s era car would be like a hardened CIA ghost vehicle in comparison to anything offered from an american tech company, even a model pitched specifically for privacy.
OnStar dates back to the 90s and could track vehicles en-mass by the mid 2000s
If you had onstar maybe
Or maybe "without privacy problems," the way the industry is going?
GM announced several months ago that their newest infotainment system, developed in partnership with Google, will not support CarPlay. Other manufacturers could start to go in the same direction. If Apple is committed to the in-vehicle interface, their own car ensures that they have a vehicle to display it in.
I assume many of these seemingly odd efforts by big companies are to help fill their patent portfolio.
That is also a very reasonable hypothesis. It would be interesting to know the economics in this case, if that turned out to be true. Spinning up an entire automotive engineering R&D division seems like a very expensive way to generate patents.
> Spinning up an entire automotive engineering R&D division seems like a very expensive way to generate patents.
What's the alternative? Real patents usually come from real work, rather than thought experiments.