Although smart phone support in cars is old school in 2015, what if you could buy a car that was designed from the ground up to work with the latest model iPhone?

That’s the problem Apple may well be tackling with a report today that they are building an electric car, or as it will may well be called, the iCar.

The Wall Street Journal claims that Apple “has several hundred employees working secretly toward creating an Apple-branded electric vehicle.”

The car, said to have been green lighted by CEO Tim Cook over a year ago, is described as resembling a minivan.

Rumors around Apple’s interest in cars has been swirling for some time, peaking earlier this week with reports that a mysterious “Apple van” had been spotted in San Francisco. Business Insider reported that one Apple employee had contacted it claiming that Apple would give Tesla a “run for its money.”

Speculation didn’t point to an electric vehicle however, with claims that Apple could simply be working on more integrated iPhone to car systems.

As absurd as the proposition may seem at the outset, why not?

Apple is already the largest company by market capitalization in the history of the world, and is set to also be the first company to hit a market cap of $1 trillion.

There’s only so many things you can do to drive corporate growth with phones, tablets,  laptops and Beats Audio. Rival Google has been working on cars for some time now, with everything from a retrofitted self driving car system to actually building a car from the ground up that was recently speculated to be an effort to take on Uber.

Apple building a car from the ground up is no more fanciful than Google doing so, and unlike today’s reports the Google Car project is a confirmed fact.

The car industry is also ripe for disruption as well. While offering variety and choice, the big three in the United States are still primarily wedded to the 20th century fossil fuel driven model than made them what they are today. Tesla Motors Inc. has shaken the innovation tree somewhat, but despite Elon Musk’s undoubted genius, Tesla still hasn’t worked out the problem of volume due to an ongoing high price point.

Imagine an iCar that comes in at about the same price as a Ford Focus at around $17,170 in the United States. The iCar will not only fully integrate with your iPhone, it will be electric with a range of 300-400 miles, the body will be made from environmentally friendly materials, oh, and you can buy it with a repayment plan from an Apple Store, and if you ever can’t work out how to use it you can make a free appointment at the Genius Bar for assistance.

That may sound like an Apple fanboy fantasy novel (for the record the author of this post prefers Android) but again, why not? If Apple wants to continue to grow it has to enter new markets; cars may sound absurd but many would have said the same thing of the iPod when it was first launched, and we all know how that turned out.

Image credit: Liviu Tudoran / featured image: concept Franco Grassi