The “Why?” of the apple car is the interesting part of this to me. The earlier mention of Virgin Atlantic was a good reference. “Design” as a business is getting very bold right now and I think a lot of the perceptual footprint of that (even in light of all of the in-house moves going on) is the Design team as a 3rd party that can drop in and see the issues that you’ve been living with for so long that you no longer have perspective on.
Combine that with the fact that there could be a lot of white space around the idea of sitting in a box for some minutes to some hours (or days?) as the car takes you somewhere. How will you entertain yourself? Do you even need to be in the car for it to run your errands? Whats the interface on either end of those errands? (apps for ordering, humans or machines loading your car, what does the car do with it when it gets home) etc, etc
Then you get into the big iron data analytics stuff… if some large percentage of cars and logistics vehicles are automated, data models for traffic, delivery times, fuel consumption, etc all start getting a lot tighter. it’s kind of the ramification of all the big data talk from years past. someone has to make all that data usable.
Most of these areas are things that apple could more viably play in… much more so than the car itself. So perhaps the thinking is - if you control the centerpoint of all this stuff, then you can set and enforce the standards for all of the periphery… which is totally a page out of apple’s playbook.