The place where Apple tested its secret car for years has now been bought by the very company that succeeded where Apple failed. Waymo, the self-driving vehicle firm owned by Alphabet, paid 220 million dollars for a 5,500-hectare test track in Arizona - a property linked to Apple through a shell company. The sale was registered on 5 June.

The track is no ordinary meadow. It has a 115-hectare city course, a vehicle-dynamics zone, an oval circuit six and a half kilometres long and a highway stretch, built specially for testing autonomous vehicles. Waymo says it will use the space for driverless tests, for operations training and for future expansion - in other words, to fine-tune the system before letting it loose on the streets.

The irony is complete once you see the history. Apple bought the property in 2021 for 125 million dollars, after years of leasing it, to test the prototypes of Project Titan - the ambitious, legendarily expensive attempt to build its own car. After billions spent, the project was shut down in early 2024. Now Waymo takes over the same ground for 95 million dollars more than Apple paid - and with a plan, not a question mark.

The difference between the two companies is exactly that. Apple spent billions and ultimately gave up; Waymo already runs close to 4,000 vehicles across more than ten American cities and is announcing the production of tens of thousands of robotaxis a year. When one giant sells a test track and another buys it, that's not just a real-estate deal - it's a map of who lost and who won the race for autonomous driving.