An excellent article by the Guardian in the UK has confirmed that the Apple self-driving car is soon to be tested at the GoMentum Station in California.

This will come as no real surprise to most, as rumours of the secret Apple ‘Project Titan’ have been circulating for some time. In addition to the original unknown sources the circumstantial evidence has been steadily mounting, including the possible Sunnyvale driverless facility, key hires from the automotive sector, and those mysterious Apple vans that many mistook for being self-driving, but are almost certainly mapping vehicles which could be providing the data for a driverless system.

The article does however make one assumption, based on our expectations in the current paradigm. It assumes that the Apple vehicle will be a ‘car’.

In the rapidly approaching new transportation paradigm, self-driving or autonomous vehicles (AVs) will likely take the most optimal form for their required function. It is therefore worth considering that an AV could be a shuttle, a pod that combines into a road train, or a minivan, or a bus, or a sidewalk friendly ‘deliverbot’ (as Brad Templeton has termed them) delivering small packages and pizza to you. An AV doesn’t have to have two wheels either, it could be a side-by-side two-wheeled vehicle like the General Motors EN-V, or even a self-delivering bicycle such as Baidu are reported to be developing in China.

Continuing the two-wheeled theme, it is interesting to note that the Apple employee named in the Guardian article previously worked at Lit Motors. Lit are an exciting startup company developing an in-line enclosed motorcycle-type electric vehicle called the C-1. Unlike a conventional motorbike, it has gyroscopic stabilizers that require the strength of a small elephant to push the vehicle over, even when stationary.

There are many advantages of such an electric ‘bike’ over a conventional car if it were made fully self-driving. It is smaller, lighter, more energy efficient and with lane-splitting and lane sharing it helps to reduce congestion. It is more sustainable as it reduces the requirement for fossil fuels, it also produces no emissions in the urban centres – which is possibly the biggest health issue around road transportation. Urban planners may also be delighted, because shared fleets of such driverless ‘bikes’, being operated in an Uber-type fashion, would significantly reduce the need for private vehicle ownership, reduce the need for urban parking and would allow bicyclists more room on the roads.

So the new Apple vehicle may well be a 'car', but when considering the new driverless transportation paradigm, lets not make assumption about the future based on the current paradigm. The future is ours to imagine and create. We know that this is something that Apple have proven that they are capable of time and time again. Perhaps a future Apple vehicle might have just two wheels?... Hopefully we will know more in the near future.

[Disclosure: The author’s company CAVCOE raises awareness of the socio-economic impacts of AVs and provides consultancy services to businesses that will be impacted or even disrupted. The author is the expert quoted in the Cult of Mac article. CAVCOE is a partner organization of the GoMentum Station]