Apple Back on the Road?

In the automotive and tech world, this is blowing up the Internet in a way that’s bigger than Kim Kardashian’s Paper Magazine’s photo shoot: Apple has, as of today, shown up on the list of companies that has received an Autonomous Vehicle Testing Permit from the State of California Department of Motor Vehicles.

Just when everyone thought it was something that had been closed and shuttered in Cupertino, BANG!, Apple gets a permit.

Apple isn’t the only one. The official list includes:

· •Volkswagen Group of America

· •Mercedes Benz

· •Google

· •Delphi Automotive

· •Tesla Motors

· •Bosch

· •Nissan

· •GM Cruise LLC

· •BMW

· •Honda

· •Ford

· •Zoox, Inc.

· •Drive.ai, Inc.

· •Faraday & Future Inc.

· •Baidu USA LLC

· •Wheego Electric Cars Inc.

· •Valeo North America, Inc.

· •NextEV USA, Inc.

· •Telenav, Inc.

· •NVIDIA Corporation

· •AutoX Technologies Inc

· •Subaru

· •Udacity, Inc

· •Navya Inc.

· •Renovo Motors Inc

· •UATC LLC (Uber)

· •PlusAi Inc

· •Nuro, Inc

· •CarOne LLC

· •Apple Inc.

Somehow I missed the buzz when, say, Zoox signed up, or Nuro.

(Zoox, however, did get a bump earlier this month when it hired Mark Rosekind, the former head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), to be its new chief safety innovation officer. And evidently Nuro is stealthy by its own accord (there is almost no information on its website, nuro.ai, although its founders, Jiajun Zhu and Dave Ferguson were with what was then the Google Self-Driving Cars program, with the former being a founding member of the team and the latter software engineering manager.)

Now there is certainly understandable excitement vis-à-vis Apple and a car, no matter what Level it is at.

But earlier this week, new broke that Apple is working on a non-invasive glucose monitoring capability.

I’ll bet we see that long before an Apple Car.