"Parkinson observed that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult to criticize constructively"

For Apple's task of building a automated car, industrial design is an "unimportant but easy-to-grasp" issue since Apple's expertise is design. They should have focused on the harder core problem of a car that can drive itself.

In fact this seems almost like an archetypical example of bikeshedding.