I assume he's talking about the car project. It seems like they now have fewer than 1000 engineers on that project, so I can't imagine what they're doing with that few engineers. That would be pretty small scope in the auto sector. There's one large automaker I consult for and they've got more people than that just working on software they use internally.

So, in scale, it might seem like a vanity project, but Apple obviously knows something we don't. For example, Tesla hired a couple of chip engineers from Apple and designed their own chip (to replace the NVidia gpu they were using). Maybe Apple has something unique in the pipeline that would be applicable to machine vision or something else useful to cars and it makes sense to market that to OEMs (I highly doubt they're building an entire car with so few engineers, makes more sense that they would be supplying a component and/or software).