Almost every person hyping the eminent arrival of self driving cars seems to ignore 2 very big hurdles that aren't going to be solved anytime soon. The biggest issue, and this issue is going to take us beyond 2019, is our national infrastructure. Our roads are absolute crap overall. Until we can upgrade our roads and bridges self driving cars will be more a menace than savior. Reports already indicate self driving cars are clueless when dealing with potholes and faded lane markings. They also have trouble with the different configurations of traffic signals. Then there's the government. I'm not even going to address that group of circus clowns.Apple won't make the car self driving? Only if they don't want anyone to buy their car. The technology may not be ready today, but Tesla says that before the end of next year, they'll have fully self driving cars. If Apple doesn't launch a car until 2019, then it has to be fully self driving. Otherwise, it'll be far too little, far too late.
If Apple really wants to get into the car game though, they can.
They have over $200B in the bank. Making a car factory costs around $5B. So Apple could take that money and use it to build 40 factories around the world. Each of those factories could pump out 500k cars a year, so 20M cars total per year. That would cause Apple to have around 33% of the global car market.
Car manufacturing isn't a Field of Dreams "build it and they will come" scenario. If it was that easy, every car manufacturer would just build factories.