An Apple self-driving car has been spotted in California, and it's built from off-the-shelf parts

Apple received permission to start testing self-driving vehicles on California’s roads earlier this month. It’s now two weeks since the permission was granted and, finally, an Apple-powered self-driving car takes to the streets of the state.

Photos of the car have been handed over to Bloomberg , and its subsequent report on the car suggests that it’s festooned with off-the-shelf sensors, including a 64-channel lidar unit from Velodyne Lidar Inc. Lidar is short for light detection and ranging and is the range detection and environmental scanning tool of choice for self-driving cars these days. This was confirmed by a hardware expert whom Bloomberg consulted with.

Lidar is very similar to radar in operation, except that it uses lasers instead of radio waves to do its job.

Bloomberg says that the car, which appears to be a Lexus RX450h SUV, also appears to have two radar sensors and a bunch of cameras on it.

We’ve been hearing of Apple’s self-driving car project since last year and there were even rumours that it was shut down.

While Apple has remained very reticent about its work on the project, various bits of information suggest that Apple is looking at a 2020 launch for whatever it is that it’s working on. It’s still not clear whether Apple actually intends to build a self-driving car or a self-driving platform.

Bloomberg points out that Alphabet’s Waymo is also using the same Lexus SUVs for testing self-driving technology.