FUTURE PROOF

Paul Horrell on the danger of bold predictions and overly tight briefs

Overly tight briefs, you will be aware, can inhibit fertility.

We’re talking about journalistic enterprise here. If I’m told too exactly what to write, then there’s little point in uncovering unforeseen information, because there will be no home for it within the constraining brief. Glad to say, then, that the brief for this monthly column was along the lines of, “Write about, y’know, the future an’ stuff.” So I began, last issue, looking at how autonomous cars are slipping further into the future as the problems of developing them become more apparent.

This is a reminder no one can be exact about the future. They’re just modelling and extrapolating, not actually observing. We do know things are changing fast, mind. Three years ago, I interviewed BMW’s then sales and marketing chief Ian Robertson. He said the car industry would undergo a transformation within a decade as big as the changes of the whole past century. I wrote the piece giving air to his view, but making it clear I was sceptical. Within a year I’d decided he was right and I was wrong, and next time I saw him, I scraped together the grace to admit it.

But the very speed of change is the exact reason it’s hard to predict things will be disrupted. Rapid change is often the result of external forces, not the car business’s own impulse. Established carmakers are risk-averse. It was Tesla that turned the world onto the idea an electric car could be something exciting, and not just a slightly wearisome necessity to moderate our destruction of the planet as Nissan and Renault had proposed. Google’s efforts in autonomous driving, I’ve always suspected, are very different from, say, Mercedes’. Google wants us to be freed up while in the car to use our devices, thus bestowing on that company more of our data, the selling-on of which is its core business.

So while we know many things are transforming, we must beware being specific about which and when and how. I first drove fuel-cell cars in the mid-Nineties, when we were told they would become affordable and commonplace five to 10 years after that time. That prediction has remained, tantalisingly, five to 10 years away ever since. We were initially told autonomous drive would come first in expensive luxury cars. Now we assume the first vehicles to use it will be taxis, because doing away with the cost of a human driver will pay for the tech. In the Eighties I reported on experimental roadside transponders to tell cars the speed limit. Now they just use cameras to read the signs. In 1894, predicted: “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.” Nope, because the growth of traffic was cars, not horses, and we have a different kind of pollution.

In a tempest of change, you really don’t know what’ll get blown for miles and what’ll just spin around and end up roughly where it started.

“GOOGLE’S EFFORTS IN AUTONOMOUS DRIVING ARE VERY DIFFERENT FROM MERC’S”