Around the Corner

With self-driving cars on the cusp of commercial reality, Adam Hay-nicholls assesses the trends and innovations set to change the way we drive

olls-royce has strived to build the world’s finest luxury cars for more than a century, and a key ingredient is technology. One of the fabled marque’s rock star customers, Frank Zappa, perhaps put it best: “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” With its Vision Next 100 concept (pictured here), codenamed 103EX, the marque reveals what it expects to see on stately gravelled driveways 100 years into the future. While some features are pure Rolls-royce, such as an Led-projected red carpet that greets you as you approach the car and a Hal-style virtual butler by the name of Eleanor, others are just a few years away from mainstream vehicles. Google is testing hundreds of its Waymo self-driving cars in the US right now. While Silicon Valley has been the epicentre of the race to develop artificial intelligence and autonomous pilotage, the more established car brands could yet overtake them. Audi, Toyota and GM each intends to introduce a self-driving car in 2020, with Ford and BMW a year later. In fact, Audi’s latest A8 sedan is the first production car in the world developed for highly automated driving. Boasting Level 3 automated driving capabilities, the car is able to drive autonomously, under certain circumstances, including legal constraints, with the Audi AI traffic jam pilot. (The newly developed feature drives the car automatically in slow-moving traffic on highways and expressways at speeds up to 60 kmh.) “I think there’s still a long way to go before autonomous driving becomes an everyday