The Apple Car project continues to trundle on despite reports of various management and engineer changes in recent years, and who knows whether anything will ever come of the so-called Project Titan. But project or not, the patents keep on coming.
The latest is related to one of the least exciting but arguably most important parts of a car — seatbelts. And you just knew that if Apple was going to reinvent the humble seatbelt, it wasn't going to just tweak it and call it a day. Instead, Apple's seatbelt patent is an entirely different beast.
While the part that is designed to actually keep occupants safe will largely remain the same as we're used to, it seems Apple Car seatbelts will go one step further by using a display of sorts to pass information to the person sitting in the seat.
Seatbelt alert system
The new patent was first spotted by Patently Apple and describes what appears to be a next-generation seatbelt system that will display light through small holes to inform people of a given situation or status.
In short, the seatbelt could light up red to alert people that it isn't correctly fastened, for example. Or green if things are all hooked up correctly.
The patent describes holes that are so small that people are unlikely to spot them during normal use, although we have to imagine that anyone getting too close will see them.
As if that wasn't enough, there's also a provision for some sort of display that may be used to control such lighting systems, although it isn't clear how useful that would be to people.
Now that the Vision Pro headset is here the Apple Car is one of the last remaining rumors that is yet to actually ship. Apple's headphones were long-rumored before turning into AirPods Max, and its item tracker was the same before we got AirTags.
Will we finally, one day, see a car driving around with an Apple logo on it? You can be sure it'll have the coolest seatbelts around if we do.
