In the lap of luxury on a magic carpet ride

Your first motoring event of 2018 is the Autosport International show at Birmingham’s NEC from January 11-14. If you buy your tickets before the end of this month you’ll be entered into a draw to win tickets for Passione Ferrari at Silverstone at the end of April – with its huge collection of mouth-watering Ferrari sports and F1 cars. Tickets include the live show and performance car show. Go to autosportinternational.com

info. AUDI proudly boasts that its new A8 luxury saloon is the world’s first Level 3-enabled self-driving mass produced car.

Or it will be next year when many of the 40-odd supertechy systems will start to become available on it.

The A8 will have a thing called Traffic Jam Pilot – which works on motorways or dual carriageways and takes charge of driving the car at speeds up to 37mph.

If the system thinks you’ve nodded off it will give visual and acoustic warnings, and if that doesn’t do the trick it will do an

emergency stop. It all sounds very impressive but let’s have a look at the car itself and see how it performs traditional tasks.

First thing to get our heads around is Audi’s new naming system that is being introduced with its flagship model. Although still called an A8, our test car, for example, is an A8 50 TDI.

Does 50 mean that it’s got a 5.0-litre engine? Sadly it’s not that simple. The engine is actually a 3.0-litre and the number 50 refers to the band of power output the engine falls into.

Anyway, the new A8 is bigger and heavier than its predecessor and is longer than its rivals from BMW and Mercedes in both normal form and in long-wheel-