‘Human brains are funny things and I actually feel sorry for a car that can read your mind’
AS A BIKER, I always felt that doing a wheelie was the equivalent of doing a tailslide in a rear-wheeldrive supercar – you give it a big slug of throttle to unsettle it, you have about three milliseconds to catch it, and if you go too far it all ends in disaster. I’m too scared to do wheelies.
However, there is no car equivalent of getting your knee down. For those of you who aren’t bikers, this is of course when you lean a bike so far over in the middle of a corner that your knee-slider (the plastic puck attached to your leathers) scrapes the tarmac at the apex. This – after much buttock-clenching practice – I have done, and I can tell you it feels fantastic. It’s hard to describe why – there’s something about the skrrttt noise, and the texture-filled vibration that shivers up your leg that makes you feel literally in touch with the road. It’s like when you’re in a rowing boat, drifting along, and you dip your fingers in the flowing water… imagine doing that, out the door of a Caterham… only without reducing your fingers to bloody stumps.
Anyway, I have good news, because there may finally be something useful to come out of all this autonomous technology stuff. Nissan recently unveiled a prototype Brain-To-Vehicle (or B2V) system, which allows a driver to plug his or her brain into a car’s software. Basically, you get in the car and put on a kid’s cycling helmet, and then electrodes capture an electroencephalograph or EEG of your brain activity. Yes, the car is actually reading your mind as you fly along the motorway, thinking about the spaghetti you’re going to have for supper… which makes you wonder about Jamie Oliver dyeing his hair… which makes you think about the haircut you need on Saturday… which makes you think about a trip to B&Q… which makes you think about wallpaper paste… Human brains are funny things and I actually feel sorry for the car.
But that’s okay, because Nissan says it developed the B2V system for two reasons. First, ‘to predict’. It reckons the system knows when you’re about to steer, because it reads brain activity called ‘movement-related cortical potential’. By processing everything quicker than the soggy porridge in your head, the AI can start to steer for you, moments before your arm starts moving, cutting down thought-to-response time by up to half a second. ‘On mountain roads where there are lots of tight corners, drivers can easily keep their car under control,’ purrs Nissan, ‘helping them drive better and with more confidence. The system even enables highly skilled drivers to outperform their usual high standards on such winding roads.’
And if you’re wondering what happens if you reach over to turn on the radio – ie does the car swerve sharp left and plunge into a ravine? – Nissan says the system is intelligent enough to differentiate. So that’s all good. No plunging balls of fire, crashing into ravines.
The second reason Nissan’s developed this system, it says, is ‘to detect’. It imagines you’re riding along in your autonomous pod, feeling a bit sick or wishing it would get a move on and get you to the airport quicker. These feelings can be detected, apparently: Nissan talks about ‘the variance between what the driver expects and what they are experiencing’. Called ‘errorrelated potentials’, these are then ‘analysed and interpreted for immediate implementation by onboard autonomous systems’. So you think ‘I’m too hot’ and the car will cool you down. Think ‘I want the ride to be softer’ and it will adjust the suspension. Or you think, ‘Wow, I wish autonomous cars had never been invented so I could drive instead’ and the car will ignore you and turn on the radio.
Anyway, what’s all this got to do with getting your knee down? Because surely if a new channel of communication is opening up between man and car, the information can be reversed. Could sensors in each wheel feed road texture into your brain? Could this bring a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘steering feel’? Maybe ‘driver engagement’ is about to get really visceral. Maybe driving the Caterham of the future will be like a mind-bending psychedelic acid trip down Willy Wonka’s chocolate river. Take that, sterile, emotionless, robot cars.