[citation needed] — how do you know what Apple has or doesn’t have? People are making assumptions based on leaks — leaks, that wouldn’t surprise me if they were actually coordinated and on purpose designed to mislead the media.

Five random Titan engineers wouldn’t just start talking to the Times. Not if they wanted to stay working at Apple. So it makes you wonder if their “leaking” is designed to mislead.

That is, of course, at least partially true.

However, in the OSX analogy above, Apple had a very good platform (NeXTSTEP) that had been commercially available and proven in real-world use for ~a decade before they started modifying it to become OSX. There is no similarly mature self-driving car platform for them to be working from, and we can be sure of that.