Apple wants to put you behind the wheel of one of their electric cars in five years, according to a report.

The development plan is uber aggressive as most car companies take up to seven years to develop an auto.

But Apple CEO Tim Cook, apparently hungry to keep the tech titan on the cutting edge of new societal hot spots — the company will roll out a smart watch in April just as the world warms up to wearable tech — is putting the pedal to the metal, the report said.

An Apple car in your driveway by 2020 would set up a nice face-off with Tesla Motors and General Motors, both of which are targeting a 2017 release of an electric vehicle that can go more than 200 miles on a single charge and cost less than $40,000, according to the report from Bloomberg, which cited people with knowledge of the matter.

“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 Thursday. “Now you have Apple coming in and this is critical mass. Was GM really going to be able to match Tesla? Apple can.”

Experts seemed impressed with Apple’s pace of development.

“If you’re starting from scratch, you’re probably talking more like 10 years,” Dennis Virag, president of Automotive Consulting Group, said. “A car is a very complex technological machine.”

Apple is a profits-generating monster and can certainly afford to undertake such an expensive and risky task. It made $18 billion during the past quarter — bringing its total cash stash to $178 billion.

That’s a lot of money and shareholders are starting to get antsy and are beginning to ask for some of it top be spread around. Heck, the company spend a very healthy $6 billion on R&D last year — but even at that rate it will take them nearly 30 years to plow throw a pile of cash that big.

While the company has not commented on its car plans — and certainly it can change its mind or fail in its attempt — the ideas of such an undertaking is not unprecedented within the company, the report notes.

Apple wasn’t the first to make a digital-music player or smartphone, and only entered those markets once it had a product that redefined those categories.

Apple’s apparent car venture, code named Project Titan, got a little support this week after reports that a car battery maker had sued the Cupertino, Calif., company for allegedly poaching its executives.

Apple began around June an “aggressive campaign to poach” employees from A123 Systems, the Waltham, Mass.-based battery maker said in the lawsuit against Apple.

Apple hired five people from A123 and has tried to hire battery experts from LG Chem, Samsung Electronics, Panasonic, Toshiba and Johnson Controls, according to the lawsuit.

“Apple is currently developing a large-scale battery division to compete in the very same field as A123,” the battery maker said in a separate state-court filing, according to Bloomberg.

The recent hiring effort at A123 began with Mujeeb Ijaz, a former Ford Motor Co. engineer, who founded A123’s Venture Technologies division, which focused on materials research, cell product development and advanced concepts. He began at Apple in June and began hiring direct reports from A123’s venture technologies division, which he had headed, according to the report.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk told Bloomberg Businessweek this month that Apple was seeking to hire away his workers, offering $250,000 signing bonuses and 60 percent salary increases.