Hi-tech is out of hand
ON A technical seminar at Volkswagen, I was shown a self-driving car. No surprise there, you might think. But this was 30 years ago. “Where would you like it to go?” I was asked and I chose a route through several pylons marked out on the wide open space of the proving ground. At once, the VW Beetle, with no-one on board, started its own engine and drove off, steering perfectly between the cones, The secret was that the driver was seated in a Microbus with a closed-circuit TV screen showing the windscreen view and all his commands of clutch, gears, accelerator and brakes were transmitted to the car.
Now we are told that the technology to do this without the driver is on the way and is already being tested in major cities including Coventry and Bristol.
The official government view of driverless cars seems to be a utopia in which all traffic bowls smoothly along at precisely the speed limit, never hitting anything and leaving the occupants free to get on with work or read- ing. They have thought of everything, except one — do we want them?
Well, even in a “driverless” car, there will always have to be a driver, alert and ready to take control. Electronic systems can go wrong, as happened recently in America. A self-driving Tesla failed to identify the difference between the sky and the colour of a truck crossing the road in front of it, resulting in a crash which killed the driver.
This is why we resisted the temptation to illustrate this article with a picture of someone sitting at the wheel, reading the This will not happen. There will always need to be a driver, alert and ready to take control.
And what of the high-performance car? Who would spend a fortune on a Mercedes or Aston Martin just to tootle along at the speed of the slowest? Will the self-driving car be programmed to hoot and flash its lights?
Many other matters, such as insurance, driver responsibility and liability in an accident, have to be addressed.
And, as an article in the Institute of the Motor Industry magazine concluded, for anyone who wants driverless vehicles, we have them already. They are called trains, buses and taxis.
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