Apple fans have long said that the computer giant and Route 14 Investment Partners are linked, even though there isn’t much proof. When we went to Route 14’s testing facility in Arizona, we saw a car with a sensor stack that looked like the device Apple had been using. We also found records that link at least one person to both businesses. In late 2005, Toll Brothers and its partners paid $312 million to buy DaimlerChrysler’s testing centre in Wittmann, Arizona. The new owners wanted to build a planned village with about 33,000 homes on the 5500-acre plot. It never happened, and when the owners stopped making loan payments in 2010, the project’s lender, iStar, took over the proving ground. After owning the land for over ten years, the business real estate finance company sold it to Route 14 Investment Partners LLC for $125 million in July 2021. Route 14 Investment Partners knew the location well. About five years ago, the little-known limited-liability business started renting the proving site from iStar, which is based in New York. A lot about Route 14 Investment Partners remains unknown because there isn’t much public information about the business linked to cars. People keep saying that Route 14 Investment Partners is a company working on Apple’s car project, which was initially called “Project Titan” and may still be called that. Apple’s supporters say that comments from unnamed sources and that Route 14 Investment Partners was started soon after the tech giant’s rumoured car project was first mentioned in early 2015 proved that the company is working on a car. They also say that Apple and Route 14 Investment Partners both use CT Corporation’s Corporation Trust Company, which acts as a registered agent for businesses that incorporate in Delaware and lets them take advantage of the tax benefits of the First State without opening permanent offices there. The fact that hundreds of thousands of other companies, such as Ford, Toyota, and Tesla, have used CT’s services shows how fragile Apple’s relationship with Route 14 Investment Partners is. People in Arizona are free Last month, we flew to Wittmann, Arizona, to look at the testing grounds for Route 14 Investment Partners. The little unorganised desert city about 35 miles northwest of Phoenix is an excellent place to test self-driving cars because it is dry and sunny. Based on what we saw when we checked out the proving ground, we can confirm that Route 14 Investment Partners’ building has technology for self-driving vehicles. We took pictures of a white Lexus RX from the fourth generation with a sensor stack on its roof in a section of the proving field that was closed off. The design of the sensor stack, which looks like that of several Lexus RXs seen in California, is more telling. We got the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) for five California-registered Lexus SUVs because we had pictures of them, some of which clearly showed the licence plates. After that, we compared each VIN to the ones listed in California’s 2022 data for autonomous mileage. (Any company testing the technology for an autonomous vehicle on public roads in California is forced to share information about when the system fails.) What did it all add up to? All five VINs were the same as what Apple said in its reports. Of course, another company may try a similar design for a sensor pack. Even though we had more evidence than just a shared registered agent in Delaware, it didn’t look like we had enough to convince a hypothetical jury “beyond a reasonable” The lack of a licence plate or Vehicle Identification Number for the RX we saw at the former DaimlerChrysler proving ground has led us to “doubt” that Route 14 Investment Partners is an Apple company. How we relate to the environment While checking out the proving ground, we saw nothing else that stood out. However, we did see a sign on a chain-link fence near the area that read: Before we went to Arizona, we looked through public record sources for clues that might lead us to more information about Route 14 Investment Partners. We had never been to the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) website during that time. It was a sign from above. After getting into our hotel in the Surprise area of Arizona, we went online to the ADEQ website to search for paperwork after we had left Wittmann. One of them was for the water system at the proving ground. The names and phone numbers of the system’s owner and the administrative contact are in the paper. Apple’s offices in Cupertino also use the owner’s phone number. Both numbers have Silicon Valley area codes. We both didn’t get a callback. On the other hand, our research led us to think that the supposed owner, William Lynch, is directly connected to both Apple and Route 14 Investment Partners. Lynch does not usually go by the name William. This is clear from his Route 14 Investment Partners email address and the voicemail message on the phone number mentioned in the ADEQ document. He would instead be called Ken. A quick check on LinkedIn turned up Ken Lynch’s profile. Lynch is an Apple employee who has worked in the company’s environment, health, and safety departments for almost ten years. Even though it doesn’t prove anything, it is interesting. Again, we looked at public information for help, and this time we found EPA records with contact information for an Apple employee named Ken Lynch. When we called the number next to Ken Lynch’s name on these EPA submissions about Apple, we got a message. We were given a greeting almost the same as Lynch’s phone number welcome for Route 14 Investment Partners. We recorded both welcomes on video and watched them back to back-a few times. We won’t know that these two phone lines belong to Ken Lynch until he answers our questions and puts this matter to rest. Apple told us it doesn’t know how it or its workers are connected to Route 14 Investment Partners. Is Apple betting on everything? For years, there was proof to back up the story that Route 14 Investment Partners was involved in Apple’s car project. We now have more solid evidence that the two companies are linked. If it’s true, Route 14 Investment Partners’ purchase of the old DaimlerChrysler testing facility for $125 million shows that Apple has the money to make its profitable car. After all, Apple didn’t grow into a multi-trillion-dollar business by wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on creating products that didn’t do anything.
