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A car fitted with Apple's self-driving car tech has been spotted driving in Silicon Valley (AAPL)

Tim Cook
Tim Cook

REUTERS/Mike Blake

Apple's self-driving car tech has been spotted in the wild.

A Lexus vehicle vehicle outfitted with sensors was spotted driving around Silicon Valley, and images of the vehicle were shared with Bloomberg.

The sighting comes weeks after Apple was issued permits to test self-driving cars on California's roads.

The hardware shown in the photos isn't developed by Apple in-house, however. Bloomberg reports that its built by Velodyne Lidar, a third-party company that builds the sensors used in autonomous vehicles.

Here's a GIF of the car:

Tweet Embed:
https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/857717853398720512
Here's the car that #Apple's using to test its autonomous car technology. Story with @mhbergen. https://t.co/jHLnJDRjoS pic.twitter.com/zTezUmcZwC

Apple's self-driving car efforts are known internally as "Project Titan." They have been the subject of rumours and speculation for years, and Apple's focus is now believed to be on building autonomous software rather than an entire vehicle.

Documents obtained by Business Insider earlier this month gave us a first look at this technology, which is "capable of sending electronic commands for steering, accelerating, and decelerating and may carry out portions of the dynamic driving task." Human drivers remain in the vehicle when the self-driving mode is engaged, and can override it at any time.

Apple is pretty late to the game when it comes to self-driving tech. Waymo, a group owned by Google parent company Alphabet, has carried out millions of miles of tests, while transport firm Uber is also heavily investing in the area — though it is locked in a potentially ruinous legal battle with Waymo.

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