Apple Inc logged tens of thousands of miles testing self-driving cars in 2018, up sharply from just hundreds of miles the year before, according to data released Wednesday by the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

Reuters further reported that "Apple, which has kept the details of its self-driving program under wraps, put in 79,745 miles of testing in California in 2018, still far short of 10 million miles of testing on roads around the world by Alphabet Inc’s Waymo. But the miles put in by Apple last year far surpassed the 838 miles of testing that the iPhone maker did the previous year.

Apple has only talked in general terms about its interest in self-driving, and the company only secured a California permit to conduct testing in 2017." For more on the Reuters story click here.

With that said, Patently Apple posted a report late last month titled "A Second Chinese National Working on Project Titan has been Arrested by the FBI for Stealing Company Secrets," and noted that if anyone ever doubted Apple's Project Titan in the past, the evidence of two former employees stealing high technology secrets from the project for Chinese companies should prove just how advanced the project is at the current moment.

Of course Patently Apple also covers Project Titan patents that have come to light, and we've covered over two dozen patent filings in the last 12 months.

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