Late yesterday Patently Apple posted a report titled "While Apple continues to Hire Tesla Engineers & Executives to their Future Vehicle Project, it's Johny Srouji's contribution that's a Surprise." The report noted that "rumors over the last month have tried to escalate the timing of a car to market prematurely for the sake of hype." Late yesterday a rumor swept the globe with Hyundai hyping up their potential of working on the Apple car only to reverse course once the rumor got out of hand.

Hyundai Motor Co. has backed away from a statement confirming it is in talks with Apple Inc. on developing self-driving car that fueled an $8 billion surge in the Korean automaker’s market value Friday, saying instead that it received requests for potential cooperation from a number of companies.

Hyundai initially issued a statement saying that it is one of various automakers that Apple had been in early contact with.

Revising its statement for the second time in a matter of hours, Hyundai said it had been contacted by potential partners for the development of autonomous electric vehicles, removing any reference to Apple.

Lee Han-Joon, an analyst at KTB Investment & Securities Co. in Seoul stated for the report that "Apple needs to partner with a carmaker because it doesn’t have production capabilities and sales networks to sell its cars. Building up those capabilities can’t be done quickly so Apple will need a partner for that." For more, read the full Bloomberg report.

Should an Apple car come to market, Apple would either set up a store-within-a-store scenario, like they have with Best Buy - but with a car company network. Salespeople would have to take training from Apple.  They would also create new Apple Stores with a vehicle showroom. Apple believes in providing a superior retail experience and handing it off to a car company alone is highly unlikely to occur.

Apple is so focused on the store experience that they've even filed a patent application for a next-gen virtual store that will be able to provide users access to virtual salespeople that will be able to provide full presentations of any product or service and more.