Apple Discussing Self-Driving Cars With California’s DMV

Apple’s self-driving car program is getting very real. So real, in fact, that the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is now holding meetings with Apple about them. According to documents obtained by The Guardian’s Mark Harris, Apple’s legal counsel held an hour-long meeting with DMV representatives last month.

One of the most interesting parts of this is the detail the meeting sheds on the autonomous vehicle program at California’s DMV. The DMV has an autonomous vehicle regulation project that was implemented in January 2015 with the goal of figuring out how to deploy self-driving cars onto California’s roads; the project is working on ways to guarantee autonomous vehicles are safe, tested, and meet quality and performance benchmarks.

According to the California DMV, their autonomous vehicle program has issued permits for testing to Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, Nissan, BMW, and Honda, along with Google and auto component manufacturers Delphi, Bosch, and Cruise Automation.