We have all heard the rumors of Apple making a car. They have persisted quite a while now, and it isn’t totally inconceivable that they might actually go ahead and build this car. To fuel the fire even more, something interesting has cropped up at the US Patent and Trademark Office. A patent was recently granted to Apple, for what looks like it could be car sunroof technology. And this is certainly not something that you would find on a new iPhone. Although it is Apple, so who knows.
What The Patent Reveals To Us
There are a few interesting things we can take from this patent. The patent shows that there is variable opacity glass. Effectively, this would allow the driver, or passenger, to adjust the transparency of the car's sunroof. The patent states that the applicant is “Apple Inc” which, of course, is Apple, and then there is a section called abstract. This says, “a vehicle includes a roof, an opening in the roof, and a window that is located forward from the opening.” This surely effectively confirms that what this patent shows is something for a car, and not the next iPhone.
Vehicle leasing website Vanarama rendered its own vision of what the Apple Car could look like, which offers a look at what the sunroof could look like.
Details That The Patent Picks Out
The patent is incredibly detailed and thorough, so let's look at a few of the details. A section on page 10 has a subheading called “Background”. Within this, there is a sentence that reads “in order to admit additional light and air into the interior, some fixed-roof automobiles include a movable panel known as a sunroof”. This would appear to confirm that this is a sunroof from Apple. The patent also refers to “disclosed embodiments”, ie some of the finer details of the sunroof. One of these gets described as “another aspect of the disclosed embodiments is a vehicle that includes a movable panel assembly that is movable between a closed position and an open position.”
Aside from the text in the patent, the document also has various drawings of the roof. There are drawings of the roof shape itself, with a few jagged lines perhaps indicating where the sunroof would move too, plus some more detailed drawings of the mechanism within the sunroof. One of the drawings, Fig.8, seems to show what look like roof racks on the top. If we go down the patent, they have the label 876 and detailed analysis of the patent says that these are “track carriers” and that they each have an inner surface. Whatever they may be, this whole document does suggest that Apple are actually working on a car.
Source: US Patent and Trademark Office