In Apple circles, it said, “shipping date” often just means the date by which engineers are “ready to sign off on the product’s main features”. The Wall Street Journal has spoken to people that have said employees from across the company have been re-assigned, beefing up the original 600-person team working on it. Apparently there are around 1800 people now involved with the project.

Lutz made the comments during a CNBC interview this past Monday, responding to reports Apple has doubled-down on its automotive efforts to introduce an electric-vehicle by 2019. While making cars is a highly competitive business, the reaction thus far to Apple’s moves have been overwhelmingly positive.

As a matter of fact, the Business Insider reported Apple has about 50 former Tesla employees, mostly engineers whose specialty revolved around mechanics, manufacturing and robotics. The report said the company has no plans to make the vehicle fully autonomous on its initial launch, though the driverless auto is still part of the plan.

Meanwhile, since Apple has no experience in building automobiles, the 2019 projection date of completion might be a little ambitious according to some experts.

What remains to be a mystery however is whether or not Apple will team up with a major automaker to built its future cars or will be completely self-reliant on its own resources, similarly to Tesla Motors. Money however is seemingly no object for the tech company, as its reported holdings hover around the $178 billion range as of December a year ago according to WSJ. One doubting Thomas is Paul Kedrosky, co-founder and managing partner at SK Ventures who stated that “With Apple auto , Apple is leaping into new [and] totally different markets, under a CEO that’s not exactly reputed for his visionary status”.