Apple will reportedly begin production on its much-rumored Apple Car in 2020. Bloomberg reported Thursday that the company is pushing its development team to have the car in production in that time frame. Apple hasn't commented on the rumor, and Bloomberg didn't specify its sources.
Apple Car has all but pushed Apple Watch out of the headlines in the last two weeks. Successive reports from mainstream outlets have claimed Apple has a team as large as a thousand people working on the project, that it is codenamed "TItan," and that Apple has hired any number of people from the automotive industry.
On Thursday, we also learned that Apple has been hiring battery experts from at least one company, A123 Systems. That company has sued Apple over the nature of its poaching. Bloomberg added that Apple has been targeting battery experts at LG, Samsung, Panasonic, Toshiba, and Johnson Controls.
A 2020 timeline would be aggressive, according to traditional metrics. The established auto industry typicality takes 7-10 years to develop a new car, and few of those are started from Scratch.
Apple is starting from the ground up—even if Apple started this project 2 or 3 years ago, that represents a development time of 7-8 years. Apple could have started even earlier, of course, but it would still be quite the achievement to get a car into production so swiftly.
Then again, Apple could ditch the whole thing. It wouldn't be the first time Apple killed a project it worked hard to develop, but the company appears to be working hard on this one.