The next big thing from Apple looks more and more like it will be an electric vehicle, with a report Monday that the tech giant has committed to bringing it to market.

According to The Wall Street Journal the project, dubbed internally at Apple as “Project Titan”, has been given a “committed project” status by the company, with a target delivery date of 2019.

The commitment to proceeding with the project will also see a rapid increase in headcount, with Apple also said to be in the process of tripling the team working on the car from a current 600 people to 1800 people.

Reports of the iCar first appeared in February this year with news that the initial project had been green-lighted by Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook in 2014; during that time much of the work has been on considering whether that project was feasible or not, given it is a big step from building the latest shiny phone to bringing an automobile to market.

Interestingly, today’s new report notes that Apple isn’t currently aiming at making the new car autonomous, although like many vehicles on the market today it is likely to be semi-autonomous, with the longer term goal to take the good fight to Google with a fully autonomous car at a later date.

Ballsy

If Elon Musk can go from PayPal to SpaceX (let alone Tesla) it’s not inconceivable that Apple can go to iPhone to iCar, however it’s a ballsy move to take on the might of the global car industry given both its combined might and history.

That said, the car industry is not only ripe for disruption, it’s very, very close to being disrupted by two currently different, but soon to be combined trends: ridesharing and self-driving, fully autonomous vehicles.

Both of those trends may result in vehicle ownership switching from private, singular ownership, to more of a privately owned public utility, a move where people ditch their cars for services provided by the likes of Uber, Inc.; think of it this way, why would most people need to own a car in the not too distant future if a super-cheap, autonomously driven Uber vehicle is an app hail away?

If that sounds too far fetched, the reality is that in big cities the switch to ride-sharing over car ownership is already happening now, and this is before the near future of driverless vehicles that cuts out the cost of paying a driver.

This is where Apple steps in, because like Google, it can see that this is the future of vehicles, and they think that over the longer term they can get a slice of that market pie.

Image credit: automobileitalia/Flickr/CC by 2.0