Apple Inc.’s on again, off again self-driving car project would appear to be on again.

The company has disclosed in a letter to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that it’s keen to test its own self-driving vehicles. The letter, dated Nov. 22, was sent by Apple to the NHTSA as part of a lobbying attempt to enforce the administration to provide similar testing rights to new players in the space as it offers companies such as Google Inc.

“Apple uses machine learning to make its products and services smarter, more intuitive, and more personal,” the letter, signed by Steve Kenner, Apple’s director of product integrity, read according to Reuters. “The company is investing heavily in the study of machine learning and automation, and is excited about the potential of automated systems in many areas, including transportation.”

The letter went on to say that “executed properly under NHTSA’s guidance, automated vehicles have the potential to greatly enhance the human experience — to prevent millions of car crashes and thousands of fatalities each year and to give mobility to those without. It is vital that those developing and deploying automated vehicles follow rigorous safety principles in design and production. Such principles should not, however, inhibit companies from making consequential progress; there is no need to compromise safety or innovation.”

Apple is also lobbying the NHTSA over a current requirement to share testing data, something that the famously secretive company prefers not to do. “Data sharing should not come at the cost of privacy,” the letter noted.

However, the company seemed to acknowledge that some disclosure will be necessary. “Apple agrees that companies should share de-identified scenario and dynamics data from crashes and near-misses,” the letter added. “Data should be sufficient to reconstruct the event, including time-series of vehicle kinematics and characteristics of the roadway and objects. By sharing data, the industry will build a more comprehensive dataset than any one company could create alone. This will allow everyone in the industry to design systems to better detect and respond to the broadest set of nominal and edge-case scenarios.”

While the letter itself doesn’t detail what Apple is working on, it is clear given the contents of the letter it is working on something, but whether that is a fully functioning vehicle, or simply self-driving technology is not clear.

Image credit: Iphonedigital/Flickr/CC by 2.0