The company has put its name to apple.car, apple.auto and apple.carsaccording to Whois records, Apple website MacRumours spotted. The company has made a series of high-profile hires from the automotive industry, including Megan McClain, a former Volkswagen engineer with expertise in automated driving, and Vinay Palakkode, a graduate researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, a hub of automated driving research. Apple is reportedly preparing to bring a car to market as early as 2019, but regulations around safety and testing mean the characteristically secretive organisation would have to show their hand long before a launch event. It faces stiff competition from Tesla and Google, the latter of which has heldsecretive meetings with the government about the prospects for driverless cars in the UK.