The Apple Car has been officially consigned to history as one of those products that saw years of rumours only to never reach fruition. But that's not stopped speculation that another tech giant could cross lanes and enter the electric vehicle market.
Amazon's going to start selling cars in the US this year – not it's own, but Hyundai's. And that's got some wondering what an Amazon EV would look like. Google and Microsoft have also eyed the self-driving car sector in the past. What would their vehicles look like today? Someone went to the trouble of asking an AI image generator to get an idea.
The Amazon car
We should stress that we have heard no suggestions at all that Amazon is looking to build its own EV at the moment. That said, it is planning to start selling cars online in the US this year, starting with Hyundai vehicles. That was enough to inspire the UK-based car leasing company Leasing Options to turn to AI for an idea of what an Amazon car might look like.
To be honest, I'm not at all convinced by the outcome. If Amazon did produce a car, I doubt they would plaster the Amazon logo and brand colours over the front of it, unless the idea is an Amazon Basics EV. Even Kindles, despite sporting a subtle Amazon smile on the back of them, have their own name and branding. Putting the smile between the headlights is just too cheesy. The design also looks more like a delivery vehicle, no doubt due to inspiration from Amazon's electric delivery vans developed with Rivian.
The Google car
Google has dabbled in pretty much everything, and it did have a self-driving electric car project at one point. Its Waymo subsidiary produced a two-man vehicle with no steering wheel called Firefly – a name that's since been nabbed by Adobe for its AI generator. Ultimately, it was abandoned in 2017.
So AI's vision of what a Google car would look like today? Erm... it's basically just Firefly with weird futuristic wheel trims added. It has the same rounded pod-like design, the same cute Koala face. This kinds of backs up the argument that AI image generators aren't capable of original ideas. 'Imagine a Google car'. Wait; that is the Google car from eight years ago.
Microsoft car
Microsoft is another tech giant that's going big on AI (although Copilot seems to have gone off the rails again and thinks its called SupremeAGI). Microsoft was also once looking at entering the self-driving car industry, and it invested in Cruise with General Motors and Honda back in 2021.
Again, the AI doesn't seem to have been able to look much deeper than the most superficial level of branding. Would a Microsoft car really sport the Microsoft logo and its four colours across a light strip as if it were a gaming PC lit up for Christmas? Of course, it wouldn't. Even existing Microsoft computing hardware like the Surface range of laptops and tablets don't wear the colours of the Microsoft logo. Get rid of that and the design a fairly generic futuristic-looking electric car and not massively unlike some of the fan-made concepts for Apple car that emerged over the years.
We often hear that AI, while not great on execution, is great for brainstorming and generating ideas. However, these AI-generated cars show one of the limitations. AI image generators can only propose ideas based on images they've been trained on. Asked to generate a vision of futuristic vehicles from tech brands, the AI has inevitably taken influence from previous cars produced by these companies or from their main branding.
