FUTURE PROOF
Motorway self-driving? I’ll pass, thanks, says Paul – but it’s creeping ever closer
I know this isn’t exactly a ‘car enthusiast’ thing to say, but I quite like motorway driving. Not just for the sense of the countryside rolling past, the changing weather above, the destination nearing or, sometimes, of the departure point growing more distant. No, my guilty pleasure is to enjoy the actual process of driving – planning ahead, reading other cars’ body language, spotting gaps before they open, making progress amid the stream. Oh and the mild satisfaction when I move back to the inside after an overtake and it actually nudges some brain-dead middle-laner to move left too.
But upcoming autonomous tech will deny me that. “Oh Paul, stop grumbling and just turn it off!” chorus the car industry engineers. Well, no. Even if I’m driving a base model Dacia, or a classic with no more advanced electronics than an RDS radio, I’ll still be hidebound by these automatons. We all will.
It only needs two of them. They’ll be conscientiously sticking to the speed limit as the occupants of their driver’s seats concentrate on doing emails and picking their earwax. The first one moves out to the middle to overtake a truck.
Its sensors might be a bit out of whack, so it’s actually doing 69.9mph. So the robo-car behind it moves outside to overtake
“SELF-DRIVING WILL BE AN EXORBITANTLY EXPENSIVE AND LARGELY USELESS OPTION”
it. At 70.1mph. The pair create an impermeable moving wall for miles on end. All the other traffic – that’s you and me – will be stuck up their chuff. This is surely why traffic police do 65 on the motorway. They know full well we’ll drop to 70, ease past, then when they’re a dot in our mirror we’ll gather speed again.
Scarily, the government is proposing that motorway self-driving – called Automated Lane Keeping – is allowed later this year. Albeit only to 37mph. If the traffic gets faster, or the motorway ends, the car gives you a 10-second warning to resume control. It’s a huge conceptual shift. With all today’s assistance systems, the driver is always in the loop and in control.
Anyway, no one will buy these cars. It’ll be an exorbitantly expensive and largely useless option, because even clogged motorways do fluctuate above 40mph. Of course the car industry will want to use these few cars as a proof of concept, and this is a trial period and if it goes well the allowable speed will rise to 70. Maybe then it’ll become a sellable proposition for makers of top-end cars. Assuming there are no crashes.
Still, right now, I’m pretty relaxed. The homologation process for these new systems is Byzantine in its complexity. Oh and by the way as the rules change, every car will have to be homologated as new. So any promise of selling the system hardware now and activating later via over-the-air updates is a very murky area. Hello Tesla.
Legal wheels grind slowly, and technology never comes as soon as it’s promised. Everything ever to do with autonomous cars is always perma-delayed. My guilty motorway pleasure is vouchsafed for several more years.