Is Apple’s iCar finally coming

Apple Inc has registered domain names related to automobiles, adding to speculation about the company's plans to develop an automobile. The iPhone maker registered the domain names, which include apple.car, apple.cars and apple.auto in December, according to domain information provider Who.is.

MacRumors had first reported the news on Friday, but said the domain names could be related to Apple's CarPlay, which lets drivers access contacts on their iPhones, make calls or listen to voicemails without taking their hands off the steering wheel.While never openly acknowledging plans to build a car, Apple has been aggressive in recruiting auto experts from companies such as Ford or Mercedes-Benz.

Car technology has become a prime area of interest for Silicon Valley companies including Google Inc, which has built a prototype self-driving car.

Self-driving cars are involved in fewer crashes on average than vehicles with a driver behind the wheel, a study released on Friday by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute shows.

The study was commissioned by Alphabet Inc's Google unit, which has reported a series of minor crashes involving its self-driving fleet. It looked only at Google's fleet of more than 50 self-driving cars, which has logged 1.3 million miles in Texas and California in self-driving mode. The test fleet has reported 17 crashes over the last six years, although none were the fault of the self-driving cars, Google said.

After adjusting for severity and accounting for crashes not reported to police, the study estimated cars with drivers behind the wheel are involved in 4.2 crashes per million miles, versus 3.2 crashes per million miles for self-driving cars in autonomous mode.

Crash rates for conventional vehicles at all severity levels were higher than self-driving crash rates, the study found.

A 2015 National Highway Traffic Safety Adminis-tration study found about 60 percent of property-damage-only crashes and 24 percent of all injury crashes are not reported to the police. California law requires all crashes involving self-driving vehicles be reported to police. Google spokesman Johnny Luu said the company asked Virginia Tech \"to look into the topic given the interest and develop a robust methodology to be able to make meaningful comparison between regular cars on the road as well as our self-driving cars.\"

Luu said the study \"will be helpful making apples-to-apples comparisons moving forward.\"

A study released in October by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute compared crash rates among Google, Delphi and Audi self-driving cars in 2013 and found they had a higher rate than for conventional cars.

But that study noted the low volume of driverless miles -- 1.2 million compared with 3 trillion miles driven annually on U.S. roads.