Apple cut the number of self-driving cars and drivers in April 2019

According to the latest statistics, apple still has the third largest number of self-driving cars in California, behind Waymo (125 cars and 368 drivers) and GM Cruise (163 cars and 989 drivers).Waymo, for its part, has already begun trials of its paid-taxi program, though not on a large scale, limited to Arizona.

Apple is unlikely to scale back public testing of self-driving cars, but it could be that this stage requires replacement of car parts or that some pre-retirement vehicles need to be retired due to issues such as crashes.But in general, if companies want to commercialize their self-driving cars, they will have to scale them up, not stand still or go down.

Apple has yet to apply for a driverless test license, which will be offered by DMV in April 2018.The backup driver allows Apple to rescue the car in an emergency, or if it can't navigate properly, but the finished product needs to run independently all the time.Apple's ultimate goal is unclear.Although the company was previously thought to have been demoted to developing a third-party platform, there is recent evidence that apple is resuming work on the mature EV.For example, the company has been looking for a "revolutionary" lidar design and recently poached tesla powertrain expert Michael Schwekutsch.