The cloak and dagger of Project Titan, SixtyEight and SG5

Everyone loves a good mystery, and the team of Neil Hughes, Mikey Campbell and Sam Oliver at AppleInsider appears to have stumbled an amazing one. The crew has an exclusive look at automotive research that’s being performed at a facility “hidden in plain sight” near the Cupertino headquarters of Apple. The project is called “Titan”, the goal is to build an electric car, and serious work is being done at a location in Sunnyvale, CA.

The story begins with the rumors last fall that Apple was recruiting engineers from electric auto powerhouse Tesla for their own “Titan” project. That veracity of that information has been proven through other sources and public stories in such publications as The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.

AppleInsider began to seek the location of the car project research lab, known inside the company by the codename SG5. What they found were offices and labs belonging to a “market research firm” called SixtyEight.

The plot thickens. AppleInsider looked at publicly available records and found that permits had been issued to Apple at the site, with one building including “a battery room, reliability lab, water ingress lab, 2,000 gallon tank” and more. 

Whether the location is being used for testing or designing an electric car is unknown, but some great detective work by AI showed that SixtyEight LLC paid to import a classic 1957 Fiat Multipla 600 into the US. AI conjectures that SixtyEight could be a front being used to “purchase and import automotive equipment and tools without drawing any suspicion.”

After these revelations by AppleInsider, any mention of SixtyEight may now draw attention to the firm and to Apple’s rumored research into electric cars.