Apple, following a report in February that it has "several hundred" employees working on an electric car, has now hired a senior vice president from Chrysler. Apple has also reportedly picked up a top mobile robotics and automation researcher from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (locally known as ETH) in Zurich.

Much like the first report back in February, this new data comes from the Wall Street Journal. The Chrysler executive, Doug Betts, is a veteran of the automotive industry: he was at Michelin, Toyota, Nissan, and Chrysler before joining Apple in July 2015. At Chrysler, Betts was the global head of manufacturing quality, and he held similar jobs at the previous companies. Betts appears to be Apple's first major hire that focuses on the manufacturing side of making a car, rather than the design.

Apple has also reportedly picked up Paul Furgale, who used to be the deputy director of ETH Zurich's Autonomous Systems Lab. At ETH, Furgale worked on systems that could provide long-term autonomy for mobile robotic systems: computer vision, mapping, making decisions in highly dynamic environments, and so on. If Apple is indeed working on a self-driving car, Furgale would probably be a fine hire.

The WSJ reports that, since joining Apple, Furgale has been hiring other automation and computer vision experts, too.

As for what Apple is doing with its new hires, we can only guess. It certainly sounds like Apple is working on some kind of automotive project, especially considering some of the comments that Tesla's Elon Musk has previously made about talent moving back and forth between the two companies.

Until we actually see an Apple car, though, it would be foolhardy to presume anything about Apple's plans. A company like Apple, which has hundreds of billions of dollars in the bank, will be working on dozens of new projects and products. Most of them will probably never see the light of day as a finished product: they'll be canned before we hear about them, or they'll be baked into something else.

Apple might be working on an electric self-driving car right now, but the end result could be a future iPhone that uses computer vision and location tracking to provide contextual alerts and/or some interesting augmented reality applications—or even just some kind of gussied up version of CarPlay. It really is impossible to say at this point.