DRIVER'S CARS IN AN AUTOMATED AGE

Could there ever be such a thing as a driverless Porsche? It's certainly a proposition Porsche itself is grappling with. Porsche recently published an interview addressing this very subject with Lutzmeschke, the Porsche boardmember responsible for Finance and IT.

Can you imagine a Porsche without a steering wheel, Meschke was challenged to ponder. “A Porsche will always be a car that you will want and be able to drive yourself,” hemused in response. But he also sees significant utility in driverless tech.

“Traffic jamassistants or automated parking, for example. It’s attractive to be able to use the drive into the office during rush hour formy first virtualmeeting. Or imagine you have dinner plans and are running late – and you can let the car park itself automatically. That’s really useful. In traffic jams and when it comes to parking, the functions of automated driving will soon be 'must haves',” he said.

As a short tomediumtermoutlook, that sounds about right. What's harder to gauge is the long term landscape. It's possible, though by nomeans certain, that the advent of driverless cars will quite suddenlymake human-drivenmachines look dangerous if not downright reckless. It wasn't all that long ago, by way of example, that people happily popped babies into baskets and chucked themonto the back seat of a car while they themselves bounced around in front of unyieldingmetal steering wheels and sharp-edged dashboards without somuch as a seat belt, let alone an airbag or crumple zone.

Today, all that seems slightly, if not very, crazy. Similarly, who is to say that 40 years fromnow people won't look back on this human-driven age with its onemillion annual road deaths as seriously insane? It's very hard to predict. Perhaps best we hedge our bets and drive our Porsches asmuch as we can. One day, youmight not be able to. And if the worst doesn't actually happen, well, we'll all have enjoyed our Porsches a little bitmore in themeantime. Win-win, surely?