Have you seen that sleek Apple Car video that’s currently going viral on TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube? The car has bizarre spherical wheels and can self-park, if you can believe your lying eyes.
The video has racked up over 5 million views on Twitter alone, but it’s totally fake, in case you had any doubt.
With recent reports that Apple’s autonomous car project is still in the works, it makes sense that viral video creators would be trying to capitalize on the latest rumors out of Cupertino. But this newly viral video isn’t what it looks like. In fact, this fakery has its roots in a CGI design that’s nearly a decade old.
As the website The Drive points out, the car in the viral video appears to be based on a concept car designed in 2013, the Mercedes-Benz AMG Vision Gran Turismo. Someone apparently took that concept car and replaced the Mercedes logo with an Apple log.
The Drive also notes that trackball wheels like the one in this fake video are physically impossible, something that’s accurate here in the early 21st century. The problem, of course, is that there’s no practical way to float completely spherical wheels unless you used something like magnetic levitation, a completely improbably solution that Goodyear Tires proposed back in 2016. It’s all still fantasy, however.
If you’re excited to drive an Apple Car, we have even more discouraging for you that broke recently. There were lots of people who seem to believe Apple’s Car could hit roads by 2021, but according to MacRumors, the car won’t be making its way to consumer within the next few years, instead appearing sometime by 2025. And even that seems optimistic, given the number of obstacles that still exist for fully autonomous driving on existing U.S. roads.
Yes, plenty of people predicted we’d have autonomous cars by now. But these kinds of advancements are easier to make in the laboratory than they are on the open road. Just ask the U.S. military, which tried to build an autonomous vehicle in 1985 that would have been communicating with something like the Terminator’s Skynet.
Hold your horses, Apple fans. The robot future is near and we’re sure the automated uprising to render humanity obsolete will happen in due course. You just need to be patient.