I don't really care about electric vehicles either -- I think Toyota has its head on straight in this regard. Hybrids are fantastic. Electric vehicles are an important subset of the market, but Toyota makes vehicles that people rely on in the remotest and roughest parts of the world. If you're running drugs in the mountains of El Salvador or running from rebels in the Congo then you want a Toyota, not a Tesla.
I saw my share of Toyota Prius's and light trucks when I was working in Central Asia/Siberia, but I'm not sure it's relevant to the apple car discussion. It's generally thought that project titan is an electric vehicle (and my limited knowledge of the project from their various efforts to recruit me supports this), nor are ruggedized products Apple's traditional market. Offroad capabilities also don't make much sense in the context of a consumer-focused self-driving vehicle given the limited utility and difficulty compared even to on-road usage. It's more of a DoD research area at the moment.
So Toyota makes a strange bedfellow for Apple here.
Like many things, it's a question of definitions. There are already cars on the road operating commercial autonomous services. It's new and immmature, but in a very real sense "self-driving" is already here. L5 or offroad might still be decades out from initial introduction.
Toyota already makes cars that work really well and the company as a whole is undervalued (less than 1/3 of what TSLA is valued at). The point is for Apple to get into a huge market and make a ton of money with a best-in-class product. And no, self-driving is not already here.
