Will Richard Branson, Virgin enter the car industry?

It seems that electric cars are truly here to stay, with rumors of a battery-powered Apple car and now a suggestion by global personality and billionaire Richard Branson that Virgin might be working on an electric vehicle of its own. The news is pretty unsurprising as Virgin Group pretty much has its hand in every business. The conglomerate is made up of around 400 companies at any given time, with a heavy emphasis in transportation including Virgin America, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Trains, Virgin Galactic and (soon) Virgin Cruises.

The speculation comes from another area of transportation — Virgin Racing. While this is not a consumer-facing transit venture, racing teams are often used as catalysts for innovation. Branson has invested millions in his Virgin Racing Formula E team, a Formula 1 off-shoot featuring electric cars capable of zero to sixty in around three seconds.

Branson explained to Bloomberg TV:

When you've got tens of millions of dollars invested to win a sport, new breakthroughs happen which will then be used in normal cars.

Formula E fits in perfectly to our whole aspiration for renewable energy. We have teams of people working on electric cars/ So you never know—you may find Virgin competing with the Tesla in the car business as we do in the space business. We will see what happens.

Given his, um, track record it seems unlikely that Branson would forgo return-on-investment by not deploying the technology elsewhere. This news follows a recent story about Elon Musk's statement that cars are best kept away from human drivers. Perhaps Branson agrees, and didn't want to be the only billionaire at the cocktail party not talking about his own line of self-driving electric cars. We'll find out soon enough because if there's one thing Branson does best, it's buzz.