Imagine you’re a company, maybe even one as big, as innovative, and as reaching as Apple. Other technology companies have prototyped & released something ahead of you.

What can you do?

If you are anything like Apple, you use their head-start to your advantage, watching & learning from their expensive educations with an end-around in your playbook. You solve remaining problems from the complete opposite perspective, investing more on the fit & finish to put out a more polished product and winning over your competition in the long game.

According to our friend Elon Musk, Tesla automobiles have logged many hundreds of millions of miles worth of data – not just about the cars, but also driver feedback, situational logging, and environmental stimuli like what the onboard cameras are seeing & calculating.

With that many logged miles and that many cars already deployed, there’s no way anyone will be able to catch up to Tesla… without help.

There are rumors of loud engine noises in buildings known to be owned by Apple subsidiaries. The web has countless renderings of what an Apple branded automobile could look like.

All of that said, I (highly, highly) doubt anyone at Apple seriously explored the idea of a complete Apple Car until recently. More likely, a fork of iOS has been in the skunkworks, plugged in and listening to a variety of engines & motors, acting as the onboard diagnostics system for future iterations of existing maker’s platforms.

carOS

In the next 5 years, Apple will unveil the results of an amazingly ambitious R&D project – a “never been attempted before in the history of the world” type of project, as Apple likes to boast.

They’ll take what they learned from scaling iCloud & HealthKit, what they learned from producing and shipping over a billion iPhones, and what they learned about third-party integration via HomeKit – after crunching billions of data points provided by humans over the course of 10 years, they’ll confidently duplicate those same efforts with people-carriers by releasing carOS.

Apple is already using iPhone motion data – or lack there of – to predict traffic patterns, jams, and identify & alert people using Apple Maps that there is some type of anomaly ahead. Spooky, if not incredibly cool.

They’ll funnel & analyze the input & output of every engine already and soon-to-be in production going forward, and be able to both make real-time decisions & provide graphical output about what your car thinks, sees, and feels.

Apple mates hard with soft, so I doubt they’ll trust companies like Honda or Nissan with their secret sauces. You can’t have the hop if you don’t have the hip, and you can’t have a car anymore without it’s eyes & ears connected to the world around it.

Naturally, you can’t copy & paste in carOS 1.0 though. Apple exercises enormous self-control, omitting the obvious to slow-roll the essential so that the stubborn masses have time to casually catch-up to their speed.

Apple’s carOS efforts, from now until 2020, will moon-shot them around the competition without them ever having released their own car. They’ll sit idly by, researching, analyzing, privately blowing up all kinds of sweet motors & engines, until they’re ready to revolutionize the ways people are transported from A to B.

Hey, Siri. Remind KITT to pick-up the kids from band practice at 5:30pm.

OK. Searching the web for “Break me off a piece of that Kit-Kat bar.”