This past week has yielded a flood of rumors suggesting that Apple Inc. is working on an electric car. It is not the first time rumors of an electric car from Apple have done the rounds, but this time there is significantly more evidence supporting the notion.

Apple wants to produce an electric car by 2020

On Thursday, an anonymous source familiar with Apple’s plans revealed to Bloomberg that the company has plans to produce an electric vehicle as early as 2020.

The typical development timeframe for a car is five to seven years, Bloomberg notes. This makes Apple’s 2020 target date very aggressive and even a little over-ambitious. By comparison, Tesla Motors Inc. and General Motors Co. are both a lot further along in the development process and are targeting 2017 to put an electric vehicle, with a range in excess of 200 miles on a single battery charge and a price tag under $40,000, on the road.

Certain industry experts are of the opinion that Apple stands a good chance against these two companies:

“That’s the inflection point –the proving ground—that brings on the electric age,” Steve LeVine, author of “The Powerhouse,” a book about the automotive battery industry, said on Bloomberg TV. “Now you have Apple coming in and this is critical mass. Was GM really going to be able to match Tesla? Apple can.”

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Apple has quietly hired a horde of automotive experts to work on its electric car project

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple had created a team of “several hundred employees” working on an electric car. The project, codenamed “Titan”, was approved by Apple CEO Tim Cook more than a year ago and is being led by product design Vice President Steve Zadesky, a former Ford executive.

Close on the heels of that report followed a lawsuit filed by A123 Systems, a lithium-ion battery maker for electric vehicles, against Apple for poaching key engineers to build its own large-scale battery division.

A detailed list of recent Apple hires, published yesterday by 9to5mac, reveals a number of automotive experts that are working on Project Titan.

Names on the list include Robert Gough, former design lead at Autoliv who worked on “active safety” technology for cars; a transmission and gearbox specialist for motorsport, commercial and aerospace products, Hugh Jay; Mujeeb Ijaz, a co-defendant in the A123 Systems suit, who was CTO, VP of its Cell Products Group and Director of Automotive at A123 Systems and served as head of electric and fuel cell vehicle engineering at Ford for 15 years prior to that;  David Perner, also ex-Ford, who worked on “hybrid vehicle calibration, new vehicle launch, design and release, and research;” and David Nelson, who has just left Tesla to join Zadesky’s team. At Tesla, Nelson was a mechanical engineering manager leading a team “responsible for modeling, prediction, and verification of motor and gearbox performance and efficiency.”

Given the diverse skill set and background of these and other Project Titan team members, it is hard to believe that Apple is merely working on vehicle components and looking to improve on existing product lines such as CarPlay, the company’s iOS in-dash infotainment system.

Screenshot: SiliconANGLE via Apple Inc.