Nearly everyone seems to want an Apple Car, and those hopes were raised higher earlier this week when it was revealed that the Apple.car domain had been registered by the tech giant.

But hold on a second. After doing a little digging we discovered that Facebook registered Facebook.car, Facebook.cars and Facebook.Auto on the same day (Dec. 9, 2015) as Apple. Wait, what? Does that mean a Facebook car is coming, too?!

Everyone, pump your brakes. There's a much simpler explanation.

It turns out that the sunrise period for .car, .cars and .autos domains began on Dec. 9, 2015. So instead of connecting the dots and assuming that not only is Apple working on a car, but it might even be working on a car with Facebook (hey, anything is possible), it's more likely that the legal departments of both companies simply followed the scheduled opportunity to protect their respective brands.

For the non-domain prospectors out there, "sunrise period" refers to an early domain registration opportunity afforded to trademark holders. That early registration helps companies like Apple and Facebook avoid possible legal fights against someone (also known as a domain squatter) who might register such domains and then try to extract cash from the trademark holder.

In addition to Facebook and Apple, Google also registered Google.car, Google.cars and Google.auto. In Google's case, we know that the company actually has a car initiative in play but, for some reason, the company waited until Thursday (January 7) to register its domains.

And before you ask, we already checked, here's the list of some of the major tech companies that, as of this writing, haven't registered their .car domains: Tesla (get on that, Elon), Samsung, Sony, Microsoft, Amazon, HP and IBM.

So while Apple may one day prove the rumors true and release its own car, in this case, looking to the company's domain registrations as a hint of an upcoming electric car from Apple or, for that matter, Facebook, is likely just wishful thinking.