Apple expanding driverless cars programme

Apple's driverless fleet of cars now numbers 55 test vehicles, amost doubling from January htis year, according to Endgadet, citing figures from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).

The intake is accompanied by 83 drivers who will be testing the vehicles, the report said, because Apple hasn't been authorised yet to test self-driving cars independent of human supervision. That requires a separate licence, as was recently granted to Wymo.

Apple's vehicles are colloquially referred to by some as iCars.

GM Cruise has a total of 104 vehicles with self-driving capacity in California, with Tesla and Drive.Ai among others performing tests. Driverless cars made the news for the wrong reasons recently when one of Uber's vehicles killed a pedestrian, the first such accident, following a software problem which the human passenger could not stop in time.

The report also suggests that if all goes accordign to plan then the first real passengers of autonomous vehicles will hit Californian roads in limited numbers starting in 2019.

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