Tesla Motor’s head Elon Musk in an interview has claimed that Apple’s efforts in development of an electric car is an “open secret”. He has reported that the huge number of hires that Apple has made over the course of the past few months all show that it is indeed working on an electric car. He also said that more or less everyone in the industry is aware of this fact. He said ­ “Well, it’s pretty hard to hide something if you hire over a thousand engineers to do it,this is an open secret.”

Elon added that Tesla would welcome any company’s participation in creation of electric vehicles, but he added that the task is not easy and takes a great deal of effort. On being questioned about the threat that Apple may possess if it enters the electric vehicle market, Elon says that Apple will surely come out with a good car because it is quite obvious. The two companies have a sort of rivalry as Apple tried to lure a former Tesla employee to hire him as an expert. This move made Musk take a shot at Apple, saying ­ “If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple,”.

The Apple electric car project has had many rumors from the past many months, it is reported that the project has been named “Project Titan” which is said to have originated in early 2015. Since then Apple has made a huge number of hirings from the automotive manufacturing companies like GM, Tesla, Ford, Volkswagen, Chrysler and many more.

There have been added indications that show that Apple is really working on the project, evidenced by the fact that Apple recently was in talks to buy a huge automotive testing facility, in addition to registering domains like Apple.car and Apple.auto.