Apple seeking 800,000-sq feet of space for car project as team reaches around 600 people – WSJ

A Tesla-style concept of the Apple Car from CarWow

One of the largest property companies in the San Francisco Bay Area has said during an investor call that Apple is seeking around 800,000 square feet of space in the area to expand its car project. The WSJ quotes Hudson Pacific Properties CEO Victor Coleman talking about rising demand for space for car R&D in the area.

We’re seeing the Toyotas of the world, the Teslas of the world, BMWs, Mercedes. Ford now is out in the marketplace looking for space. I haven’t even mentioned the 400,000 square feet that Google’s looking to take down and the 800,000 square feet that Apple’s looking to take down for their autonomous cars as well.

That would be almost a third the size of the spaceship campus Apple is currently building, which is around 2.8M square feet …

The piece notes that this is still substantially smaller than a typical car factory, but it’s a lot of space in R&D terms.

The WSJ also cited ‘people familiar with the matter’ as saying that Project Titan had around 600 employees as of last year, and the company is currently working on expanding the team. We recently reported on new hires from Tesla and elsewhere as Apple appears to be prototyping car parts, with BMW/Mini maker Magna recently named as a potential manufacturer.