ALAN JUDD

‘ADVANCED’ ELECTRONICS

According to US energy futurist Tony Seba, by 2025 we’ll travel in autonomous electric cars which we won’t own, but will summon when needed. They’ll be ten times cheaper to run and should last a million miles – the Tesla S has only 18 moving parts, compared with 1,8002,000 in today’s cars. Accidents will be as rare as garages; oil companies will be radically different or dead.

Amanda Blanc, CEO of insurance company Axa UK, claims that today’s babies may never take a driving test. She says they’ll be ‘driving’ computers on wheels, and the industry will have to reconfigure itself to insure not the driver but – who? The computer supplier? The software provider? The owners of the operating system?

Already, battery costs are down by 65% since 2010, with a standard range of 80-100 miles, and there are 4,100 public charging points (just under half the number of filling stations).

But anyone remembering the 1980s may also recall the predictions made then. One had us all flying around with our personal helicopter backpacks; another that we would by now have exhausted the world’s oil reserves; another that most of us wouldn’t be here because we’d have died of AIDS. Nobody said much about the mobile phone.

I was musing thus while waiting for the recovery truck to take the Volvo away. A week ago, the immobiliser began intermittently locking the key fob in its slot while telling me to restart the engine, which it would not permit. Left for a few minutes, it healed itself. New key batteries made no difference; so I reluctantly booked it in to the main dealership. The morning I was to take it, however, it locked completely – no start, gearbox, brakes or steering.

The computer diagnosed a faulty SCU (starter control unit), which was swiftly replaced, for a swift £400-plus. My wife paid, went to drive away – and it did it again. Three days and 200 tests later, we got the car back. It had been stripped down to its electronic skeleton and reassembled (at dealership expense), without anyone being able to say exactly what the fault was. It’s been fine since.

Next day, the turn of the Fiat 500. Engine warning lights came and went for a few days. It ran normally, and the oil and coolant were fine, but then the lights stayed on and it beeped; so to the dealership we went. Their computer diagnosed faulty spark plugs – £90 for diagnosis, £35 for the plugs – and the problem was solved... to reappear the next day. This time, they couldn’t diagnose further because their internet was down. Back in ten minutes, said BT. It took 44 hours, and the car’s still there.

Electronics have made cars more reliable but, when they go wrong, you can’t do anything yourself: expensive computer diagnostics are too crude to identify which SCU component has failed, or whether it’s a loose connection, or a poor earth or just a fuse. It’s like going to the doctor with a headache and they replace your head.

Imagine, then, that it’s 2025 and we’re purring along in our wheeled computers, when the main operating system for controlling UK vehicle movements does a British Airways. Do we all crash, or go into reverse, or simply stay where we are? Staying where we are is what we should all be doing anyway, my father used to reckon.