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Another sign Apple's electric car is coming

Apple has yet to confirm whether it's building its own electric vehicle, but the company is now reportedly turning its attention to charging stations.
Written by Stephanie Condon, Senior Writer

Apple has yet to confirm whether it's investing in its own line of electric vehicles, but Reuters is out with more evidence that Project Titan is underway: The tech giant has reportedly been in talks with charging station companies and has hired at least four electric vehicle charging specialists.

Apple has been asking charging station companies about their underlying technology, Reuters reports, for reasons other than providing charging stations for its own employees (which the company already does).

Speculation about Apple's electric vehicle project, dubbed Titan, has gone on for months, with reports indicating the company is aiming to ship its first fleet by 2019. Earlier this year, it was reported that Apple has registered a handful of car-related domains. In a more concrete illustration of Apple's interest in the auto industry, the company recently announced it's invested $1 billion in China's cab-hailing service Didi Chuxing.

For a company like Apple, known for controlling the whole hardware and software ecosystem around its products, investing in charging stations as part of its electric vehicle project would make sense. Moreover, as Reuters pointed out, it would fulfill a clear need: California currently has around 8,000 work and public chargers but will need somewhere between 13 to 25 times more by 2020, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Yet even without adding charging stations to the mix, Project Titan is already a complicated endeavor for Apple.

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