While it may have become one of the world’s most powerful brands by building small, portable devices, Apple is now looking to make the leap into producing significantly larger products. It at least wants to have an impact on the emerging autonomous car market, even if it does not end up making its own-brand driverless vehicle.

The American tech giant recently recruited Dan Dodge, a former QNX and BlackBerry executive, who had been heading up a division devoted to software designed for the automotive market, according to Bloomberg.

Apple also confirmed that it was revising its targets and was not pursuing the production of a standalone driverless car with quite as much vehemence as in the past. Instead it is embracing a software-focused approach to penetrating the automotive market.

Future Prospects

While an Apple car may be out of the picture for the time being, the firm has been eager to avoid completely eliminating this possibility further down the line. Indeed a staffing reshuffle and technical issues are cited as having been instrumental in dissuading Apple from taking this route in the short term.

This news may be welcomed by companies like Tesla and Google, both of which are making their own headway with autonomous car tech. Indeed Apple’s new software-oriented stance seems like it could actually be advantageous for traditional automakers, since by licensing its driverless technologies, it may be possible for Apple-powered vehicles from a range of brands to be made available.

Potential Problems

Project Titan, the name given to Apple’s closely guarded self-driving electric car scheme, has been drawing plenty of attention, in part as a result of the secrecy surrounding it.

Self-driving cars can be seen as problematic from a number of perspectives and Tesla chief executive Elon Musk recently spoke out about the regulatory hurdles and barriers of trust which must be overcome in order to make them commercially viable.

Apple, Tesla and others may need to make use of a crowdsourced software testing service like the kind offered at www.bugfinders.com/true-crowdsourced-testing/ in order to avoid having their reputation compromised by flaws in the programming, which lead to fatalities on the road.

There have already been scandals involving Tesla’s AutoPilot service failing to operate correctly and being the cause of accidents this year. With enough time and effort, however, problems will be eradicated.