According to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the camera-equipped minivan seen on San Francisco's Bay area streets is registered to a fleet company and leased by Apple.

This van, and similar vans rigged with cameras and what appears to be spinning LiDAR sensors, have been spotted by residents recently driving around the East Bay towns of Concord and Clayton, CBS SF Bay Area reports.

A YouTube video has surfaced showing a similar van, white with California plates, driving around the streets of Brooklyn, New York last September.

Apple technology isn't typically seen on the open road except in the case of CarPlay, which launched March 3, 2014, and offers all of the iPhone's most important features inside a car.

Neither Apple nor the van drivers have been willing to reveal what the vans are doing, but many speculate that the company, which dumped Google's mapping data in 2012 in favor of its own, is creating a competing, proprietary street view database.

Meanwhile, rumors are also swirling that these vans are autonomous vehicle prototypes meant to compete with Google's self-driving car.

Technology analyst Rob Enderle, however, told a KPIX reporter that the Apple-registered van has too many cameras to be a mapping car. The amount of apparatus leads him to believe it is a self-driving test vehicle.

"It has cameras that are angled down at all four corners of the vehicle," said Enderle.

AppleInsider and 9to5Mac report that only six companies have self-driving permits, and Apple isn't one of them.

It is reportedly more likely that Apple is using the vans to add street view panorama images to its mapping data or another project.

It wouldn't be the first time Apple has tried to one-up Google on the tech playing field. Google's popular Motorola-manufactured Nexus 6 smartphone might have come with a fingerprint sensor if Apple had not stymied the effort.

Former Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside told The Telegraph that the Motorola logo on the back of the Nexus 6 was supposed to be something else.

"The secret behind that is that it was supposed to be fingerprint recognition, and Apple bought the best supplier. So the second best supplier was the only one available to everyone else in the industry and they weren't there yet," Woodside said referring to Apple's 2012 acquisition of computer and mobile security company AuthenTec.

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