Cars Articles

Cars As Investments

• Classic cars are a very poor investment.
  
  With the current economic turmoil, people are looking for safer investments, and some are buying up classic cars in the hope that these vehicles will gain in value. My advice is: don't. There's a widely held myth that classic cars never lose value and often increase in price.
  
  This is basically crap. People who invested in classic cars before the 1987 stock market crash generally lost heavily on the deal. In some cases their vehicles lost three-quarters of their value.The Wall Street Journal recently reported a severe drop in the price of low to mid-range classic cars, as the owners were forced to unload them in the face of economic downturn.
  
  Even upmarket marques like Ferraris are not immune. These cars tend to be bought during good times by people who have grown rich due to speculation on property or shares. When these investments drop in value, rich people suddenly aren't rich any more so they end up having to auction off their cars for far less than they paid for them.For example, a 2005 Ferrari 612 Scaglietti, with only 1000km on the odometer, recently sold at Turners Car Auctions for just $255,500, something of bargain considering it sold four years ago for $640,000.
  
  The really rare classics are still reaching record prices because buyers see them as a hedge against economic recession. As long as there are more buyers than sellers for the really rare models, the high prices will continue.
  
  However, if past experience is anything to go by, the current market will quickly turn around, when the sellers begin to outnumber the buyers.There will always be a few really rich classic car owners who can afford to wait for the recession to end, but there will be many more who are forced to unload their investments prematurely, at a loss.
  
  This will signal to the market that the boom is over, which will lower the value of all similar classic cars.Houses have an intrinsic value simply because people need somewhere to live. Expensive classic cars have no intrinsic value, even as transport, because they're rarely driven - they're essentially expensive works of art. Classic cars have value only because people believe them to have value. As soon as this perception shifts, the asset can quickly become a liability.
  
  For many less wealthy classic car enthusiasts, such as myself, their car is a part of their family. However, most owners will privately admit that they've spent far more on their classic than they could ever hope to get back by selling it.
  
  If you take a classic wreck and fully restore it, you can expect to recover between one quarter and one third of the money you spent on it, not including a few thousand hours of your own labour.I've been restoring classic cars for over 20 years, and my general advice is that people should buy them because they love them, not because they want to make money from them.

Hotrod Bugatti

The Bugatti Veyron is, once again, the fastest production car on the planet.

Bugatti says an orange-and-black Veyron 16.4 Super Sport achieved an average top speed of 267.8 mph at the hands of test driver Pierre Henri Raphanel. Stop and think about that for a moment. That's more than 393 feet per second and almost 4.5 miles per minute. Even Bugatti's engineers were surprised.

"We took it that we would reach an average value of 425 km/h (264 mph)," chief engineer Wolfgang Schreiber said in a statement. "But the conditions today were perfect and allowed even more."

Raphanel made his record-setting run at Volkswagen's test track in Ehra-Lessien, Germany, in the latest version of the greatest automobile ever made. He had one hour to make back-to-back runs in each direction. The speedo hit 427.933 km/h against the wind and 434.211 with it. That came to an average of 431.072, which by our math is 267.8 mph.

And that was more than enough to take the title back from Shelby Super Cars and the Ultimate Aero, which had held the record since peeling off an average of 256 mph in 2007. Raphanel set the record on June 24; Bugatti announced it on July 4. Bugatti says Guinness was on-hand to verify the record, and we imagine the guys at SSC will not take this sitting down.

As the name suggests, the Super Sport is a hot-rodded version of a car that already has too much of everything. The 16-cylinder engine has been tweaked and tuned with bigger turbochargers (four, count 'em, four) and intercoolers. Bugatti says the engine is good for 1,200 horsepower and a staggering 1,106 pound feet of torque.

The carbon-fiber monocoque is stiffer yet lighter, the suspension has been stiffened and Bugatti says the car is capable of 1.4g of lateral acceleration. The body has been revised, and the engine draws air through a pair of NACA ducts in the roof instead of two big scoops.

Bugatti plans to begin building the Super Sport this fall. The first five off the line will be identical to the record-setting car. The remainder will have the top speed governed at 415 km/h (257.8 mph) "to protect the tyres," Bugatti says.

Jeremy Clarkson On American Cars

Today, if you want something to be a commercial success, it must be designed from day one with a passport and legs. Whether a beefburger, a plastic Doctor Who toy, a strawberry, an internet people-searching site or a sport, it must be as relevant in Alice Springs as it is in the Colombian jungle.

Funnily enough, however, the biggest problem is America - the only country in the world that calls football "soccer" and insists on playing rounders and netball instead. So, if you have developed, say, a pillow that absorbs dribble, you stand a better chance of selling it to a pygmy with a dinner plate sewn into his bottom lip, than you do to Wilbur and Myrtle from Sacramento.

It's a bit like the "special relationship" Tony Blair always talked about so much. The Americans can build a nuclear-missile warning station in Britain to protect them, but it makes us the ideal first-strike target. They can extradite people from Britain, but we can't do the same from them. They can get our immediate help in the Gulf, but we had to beg for assistance against the Nazis and the Argies. With America, the world is a one-way street.

We must have their computers, their jeans and their eating habits, yet there are more Made-in-Britain labels on the moons of Jupiter than there are in South Dakota. To the average American, 'abroad' is Canada or Mexico. Any further than that and you need Nasa. Over there, a Brit is simply someone to shoot by mistake. So it's certain that Hank J Dieselburger isn't going to be buying a jar of Bovril any time soon.

Nor will he be watching a British-made car show. Top Gear is screened all over the world, from remote Himalayan villages to the bullet-ridden boulevards of Lebanon. It is a genuine, bona fide export success. But in the US it is watched only by half a handful of expats who diligently follow BBC America, and a few torrentists on the interweb.

This is partly because, when it comes to motoring, the English language makes more sense in Albania than it does in Alabama. Almost every word in the Americans' automotive lexicon is different from ours, so when we talk about motorways, pavements, bonnets, boots, roofs, bumper bars, petrol, coupes, saloons, people carriers, cubic centimetres and corners, they have no idea what we're on about.

Our forward commanders can call in a tactical airstrike in southern Afghanistan and their pilots will know precisely what's needed. But review a Fiat Punto 'hatchback' on the 'bypass' and you may as well be speaking in dog. Even their gallons are as odd as their spelling of 'centre'.

Then there's the pronunciation issue. Jagwarr, Teeyoda, Neesarn, Hundy, Mitsuboosi, BM Dubya, V Dubya - it's all completely mangled.

However, while they don't understand our car show, when it comes to the cars themselves, the one-way street works in the opposite direction. Just six months ago, and for the first time ever, foreign car makers sold more vehicles in America than those made by Brad, Todd and Bud.

And what of American cars over here? Well, if we exclude Cheshire from the equation, most people in Europe would rather have syphilis than a Buick. We'll buy their Coca-Cola, their iPods and their Motown sound, but the cars that gave Motown its name? No, thanks. Driving an American car would be like making love to Jade Goody when you had a choice.

It's odd. Why can Bill Gates sell his binary numbers to the world when General Motors can't sell its cars? I wish I had the answer, because then I might understand why I don't want to own the Callaway Corvette I used on a recent trip to Los Angeles.

Callaway is an engineering company that has been tuning and fiddling with Corvettes since the year dot, sometimes without much success. The first example I tried, way back in the 16th century, was owned by a murderer and had two turbochargers. This made the engine extremely powerful. So powerful in fact that when I tried to set off, it turned the clutch into a thin veneer of powder and shot it like talcum powder into the wind. The murderer was extremely displeased with me . . .

Since then, however, Callaway has continued to beaver away, helped along by the average American's deep-seated belief that all cars can be improved by a man in a shed - understandable when the cars in question were made in Detroit. So today it makes the Corvettes that race at Le Mans (which they can't say properly either). Furthermore, Callaway has sheds all across America, and even in Germany.

It has become a big business. And I'm delighted to say it has stopped upping the power without uprating any of the other components.

The car I drove, a one-off demonstration vehicle, was garnished with an Eaton supercharger - chromed, of course - that was about the same size as Antigua. It's so big that a special bonnet with a huge hump in the middle has had to be fitted. In the past it would have got the car from 0-60mph . . . just once, before the chassis snapped in half and the wheels fell off.

Not any more. The car is fitted with Stoptech racing brakes, Eibach Multi-Pro suspension, wheels made from magnesium and carbon fibre, and other beefed-up components from the tip of its slender nose to the back end of its Plasticine arse (which they also can't say). So it's actually designed to handle the 616bhp produced by that force-fed V8, although the standard car, which is also available as a convertible, has 580bhp.

Yes, 616bhp is a lot. It's the sort of power you get from a Ferrari 599. And yet the car you see in the pictures this morning costs just over $92,500. At today's exchange rate, that's about 35p.

At first I was too jet-lagged to drive, so I tossed the keys to a colleague who was part gibbering wreck and part Michael Schumacher. We'd kangaroo away from the lights, stall, lurch up to about 400mph and then zigzag through the traffic like Jack Bauer in pursuit of a Russian nuke.

As a result, on our way back from Orange County to Beverly Hills, I snatched the keys . . . and had exactly the same problem. The clutch is like a switch and the gearbox like something that operates a lock on the Manchester Ship Canal. And if, by some miracle, you do get them to work in harmony, you are catapulted into a hypersonic, Hollywood blockbuster world of searing noise, bleeding ears and speeds so fantastic that you mark the instrument panel down as a born again liar. I absolutely bloody loved it.

Most European and Japanese cars these days hide their thrills behind a curtain of electronic interference and acoustically tuned, synthetic exhaust noises. Driving, say, an M5, is like having sex in a condom. Driving this Corvette is like taking it off.

Oh sure, it has the same problems that beset all Vettes. A dash made from the same cellophane they use to wrap cigarette packets, a sense it's been nailed together by apes, the finesse of a charging rhinoceros and the subtlety of a crashing helicopter. But the Callaway power injection masks all this in the same way that a dollop of hot sauce turns a slice of week-old goat cheek into a taste sensation.

On the El Toro airfield, deserted since it was attacked by aliens in Independence Day, it would slide and growl like it was the love child of Red Rum and a wild lion. On the snarled-up 405 on the way back to LA, it made rude gestures to other road users, urging them to take it on, knowing full well that it could beat just about everything up to a Veyron (pronounced 'goddam cheese-eating Kraut junk'). Then, when the traffic got too bad, we cut through downtown LA, where it pulled off the most fabulous trick of them all - absorbing the bumps and potholes that would disgrace even the Zimbabwean highways authority. Simply as a result of this, I have to say it's an even better car than Chevrolet's own hot Corvette, the Z06, which rides the bumps like a skateboard. Let us look, then, at the Callaway's strengths. It is ridiculously cheap, immensely powerful, much more comfortable than you would expect, beautiful to behold and blessed with handling that belies the fact that it was designed in a country that has no word for 'bend'. It also redefines the whole concept of excitement.

If I lived over there, be in no doubt that I would have one like a shot. It suits the place very well. It is Bruce Willis in a vest. Over here, however, I'd rather go to work in a scuba suit. As a car, it would work fine, apart from the steering wheel being on the wrong side. It would be fun. It would be fast. And unlike most American cars, it isn't even that big.

As a statement, however, I fear it would sit in the Cotswolds about as comfortably as Sylvester Stallone would belong in an EM Forster novel. It isn't brash - at least not compared with a Lamborghini. But like all American cars, it does feel that way. And a bit stupid, too.

Funny, isn't it. American cars, more than all others, are built to travel and yet that's the one thing they really don't do at all well.

Feedback Loops

• In 2003, officials in Garden Grove, California, a community of 170,000 people wedged amid the suburban sprawl of Orange County, set out to confront a problem that afflicts most every town in America: drivers speeding through school zones.
  
  Local authorities had tried many tactics to get people to slow down. They replaced old speed limit signs with bright new ones to remind drivers of the 25-mile-an-hour limit during school hours. Police began ticketing speeding motorists during drop-off and pickup times. But these efforts had only limited success, and speeding cars continued to hit bicyclists and pedestrians in the school zones with depressing regularity.
  
  So city engineers decided to take another approach. In five Garden Grove school zones, they put up what are known as dynamic speed displays, or driver feedback signs: a speed limit posting coupled with a radar sensor attached to a huge digital readout announcing "Your Speed."
  
  The signs were curious in a few ways. For one thing, they didn't tell drivers anything they didn't already know - there is, after all, a speedometer in every car. If a motorist wanted to know their speed, a glance at the dashboard would do it. For another thing, the signs used radar, which decades earlier had appeared on American roads as a talisman technology, reserved for police officers only. Now Garden Grove had scattered radar sensors along the side of the road like traffic cones. And the Your Speed signs came with no punitive follow-up - no police officer standing by ready to write a ticket. This defied decades of law-enforcement dogma, which held that most people obey speed limits only if they face some clear negative consequence for exceeding them.
  
  In other words, officials in Garden Grove were betting that giving speeders redundant information with no consequence would somehow compel them to do something few of us are inclined to do: slow down.
  
  The results fascinated and delighted the city officials. In the vicinity of the schools where the dynamic displays were installed, drivers slowed an average of 14 percent. Not only that, at three schools the average speed dipped below the posted speed limit. Since this experiment, Garden Grove has installed 10 more driver feedback signs. "Frankly, it's hard to get people to slow down," says Dan Candelaria, Garden Grove's traffic engineer. "But these encourage people to do the right thing.
  
  In the years since the Garden Grove project began, radar technology has dropped steadily in price and Your Speed signs have proliferated on American roadways. Yet despite their ubiquity, the signs haven't faded into the landscape like so many other motorist warnings. Instead, they've proven to be consistently effective at getting drivers to slow down - reducing speeds, on average, by about 10 percent, an effect that lasts for several miles down the road. Indeed, traffic engineers and safety experts consider them to be more effective at changing driving habits than a cop with a radar gun. Despite their redundancy, despite their lack of repercussions, the signs have accomplished what seemed impossible: They get us to let up on the gas.
  
  The signs leverage what's called a feedback loop, a profoundly effective tool for changing behavior. The basic premise is simple. Provide people with information about their actions in real time (or something close to it), then give them an opportunity to change those actions, pushing them toward better behaviors. Action, information, reaction. It's the operating principle behind a home thermostat, which fires the furnace to maintain a specific temperature, or the consumption display in a Toyota Prius, which tends to turn drivers into so-called hypermilers trying to wring every last mile from the gas tank. But the simplicity of feedback loops is deceptive. They are in fact powerful tools that can help people change bad behavior patterns, even those that seem intractable. Just as important, they can be used to encourage good habits, turning progress itself into a reward. In other words, feedback loops change human behavior. And thanks to an explosion of new technology, the opportunity to put them into action in nearly every part of our lives is quickly becoming a reality.
  
  A feedback loop involves four distinct stages. First comes the data: A behavior must be measured, captured, and stored. This is the evidence stage. Second, the information must be relayed to the individual, not in the raw-data form in which it was captured but in a context that makes it emotionally resonant. This is the relevance stage. But even compelling information is useless if we don't know what to make of it, so we need a third stage: consequence. The information must illuminate one or more paths ahead. And finally, the fourth stage: action. There must be a clear moment when the individual can recalibrate a behavior, make a choice, and act. Then that action is measured, and the feedback loop can run once more, every action stimulating new behaviors that inch us closer to our goals.
  
  This basic framework has been shaped and refined by thinkers and researchers for ages. In the 18th century, engineers developed regulators and governors to modulate steam engines and other mechanical systems, an early application of feedback loops that later became codified into control theory, the engineering discipline behind everything from aerospace to robotics. The mathematician Norbert Wiener expanded on this work in the 1940s, devising the field of cybernetics, which analyzed how feedback loops operate in machinery and electronics and explored how those principles might be broadened to human systems.
  
  The potential of the feedback loop to affect behavior was explored in the 1960s, most notably in the work of Albert Bandura, a Stanford University psychologist and pioneer in the study of behavior change and motivation. Drawing on several education experiments involving children, Bandura observed that giving individuals a clear goal and a means to evaluate their progress toward that goal greatly increased the likelihood that they would achieve it. He later expanded this notion into the concept of self-efficacy, which holds that the more we believe we can meet a goal, the more likely we will do so. In the 40 years since Bandura's early work, feedback loops have been thoroughly researched and validated in psychology, epidemiology, military strategy, environmental studies, engineering, and economics. (In typical academic fashion, each discipline tends to reinvent the methodology and rephrase the terminology, but the basic framework remains the same.) Feedback loops are a common tool in athletic training plans, executive coaching strategies, and a multitude of other self-improvement programs (though some are more true to the science than others).
  
  Despite the volume of research and a proven capacity to affect human behavior, we don't often use feedback loops in everyday life. Blame this on two factors: Until now, the necessary catalyst - personalized data - has been an expensive commodity. Health spas, athletic training centers, and self-improvement workshops all traffic in fastidiously culled data at premium rates. Outside of those rare realms, the cornerstone information has been just too expensive to come by. As a technologist might put it, personalized data hasn't really scaled.
  
  Second, collecting data on the cheap is cumbersome. Although the basic idea of self-tracking has been available to anyone willing to put in the effort, few people stick with the routine of toting around a notebook, writing down every Hostess cupcake they consume or every flight of stairs they climb. It's just too much bother. The technologist would say that capturing that data involves too much friction. As a result, feedback loops are niche tools, for the most part, rewarding for those with the money, willpower, or geeky inclination to obsessively track their own behavior, but impractical for the rest of us.
  
  That's quickly changing because of one essential technology: sensors. Adding sensors to the feedback equation helps solve problems of friction and scale. They automate the capture of behavioral data, digitizing it so it can be readily crunched and transformed as necessary. And they allow passive measurement, eliminating the need for tedious active monitoring.
  
  In the past two or three years, the plunging price of sensors has begun to foster a feedback-loop revolution. Just as Your Speed signs have been adopted worldwide because the cost of radar technology keeps dropping, other feedback loops are popping up everywhere because sensors keep getting cheaper and better at monitoring behavior and capturing data in all sorts of environments. These new, less expensive devices include accelerometers (which measure motion), GPS sensors (which track location), and inductance sensors (which measure electric current). Accelerometers have dropped to less than $1 each - down from as much as $20 a decade ago - which means they can now be built into tennis shoes, MP3 players, and even toothbrushes. Radio-frequency ID chips are being added to prescription pill bottles, student ID cards, and casino chips. And inductance sensors that were once deployed only in heavy industry are now cheap and tiny enough to be connected to residential breaker boxes, letting consumers track their home's entire energy diet.
  
  Of course, technology has been tracking what people do for years. Call-center agents have been monitored closely since the 1990s, and the nation's tractor-trailer fleets have long been equipped with GPS and other location sensors - not just to allow drivers to follow their routes but so that companies can track their cargo and the drivers. But those are top-down, Big Brother techniques. The true power of feedback loops is not to control people but to give them control. It's like the difference between a speed trap and a speed feedback sign - one is a game of gotcha, the other is a gentle reminder of the rules of the road. The ideal feedback loop gives us an emotional connection to a rational goal.
  
  And today, their promise couldn't be greater. The intransigence of human behavior has emerged as the root of most of the world's biggest challenges. Witness the rise in obesity, the persistence of smoking, the soaring number of people who have one or more chronic diseases. Consider our problems with carbon emissions, where managing personal energy consumption could be the difference between a climate under control and one beyond help. And feedback loops aren'’t just about solving problems. They could create opportunities. Feedback loops can improve how companies motivate and empower their employees, allowing workers to monitor their own productivity and set their own schedules. They could lead to lower consumption of precious resources and more productive use of what we do consume. They could allow people to set and achieve better-defined, more ambitious goals and curb destructive behaviors, replacing them with positive actions. Used in organizations or communities, they can help groups work together to take on more daunting challenges. In short, the feedback loop is an age-old strategy revitalized by state-of-the-art technology. As such, it is perhaps the most promising tool for behavioral change to have come along in decades.
  
  

Auctions

THE collector car community left its annual week of auction extravaganzas here with much to think about.

After some uncertain years, have the value fluctuations caused by worldwide economic turmoil ended? Are the record-breaking sale prices limited to the finest and rarest vehicles, or will more common offerings also benefit from the rising tide?.

A total of 2,143 vehicles were auctioned at six events here, with total sales of at least $182 million, according to Hagerty.com, which tracks auction results for its collector-car price guide. One indicator - subject to the influence of available cars, to be sure - was the average sale price: $84,985, a healthy $17,142 higher than last year.

By genre, particularly strong sales were attained among European sports and racing cars like mid-1950s Mercedes-Benz Gullwings; rare classics like a Tucker Torpedo and a one-of-five 1933 Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow; and vehicles with celebrity provenance, like a 1932 Packard Twin Six roadster once owned by Clark Gable.

But over all there was strength, relative to recent years, from the top of the price ladder to the bottom rung.

"Our totals were only a couple million off from 2007," Craig Jackson, chief executive of the Barrett-Jackson Auction Company, said in an interview, referring to the peak year before the economy went into a tailspin. "It's coming back."

Barrett-Jackson's six-day event, the largest of the annual January auctions in the Phoenix area, accounted for more than half of the vehicles that changed hands during the week, with total sales of more than $90 million.

Barrett-Jackson's top sale was a 1948 Tucker Torpedo that brought a surprising $2.9 million. The previous record for a Tucker was $1.1 million at Monterey, Calif., in 2010. The marquee sale of the week, however, was by Gooding & Company, which sold a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing - one of just 29 produced with an aluminum body - for $4.62 million, a record for that type of vehicle. "It was aggressively estimated before the sale at $2.5 to $3 million," the president of the auction house, David Gooding, said in an interview. "Eyebrows were raised at that amount. But the sale absolutely soared past that. We had no idea it would do that well."

What might such a sale mean for the collector car market as a whole? "It is a strong but discerning market," Mr. Gooding said. "It's very, very strong for the best of the best. But average cars didn't set the world on fire." He added: "There is incredible strength for luxury brands from Europe, sports and racing cars especially, more post-World War II than prewar. Those vehicles are seeing very strong, high demand."

Even so, six auctions in town during the week may be one or two too many. Bonhams joined the party this year with a one-day event, while at auctions conducted by RM, Russo & Steele and Silver there was a drop from 2011 both in the number of cars consigned and in gross proceeds."I do see the scene as a bit diluted around the edges," Mr. Gooding said.

Even Gooding's catalog offered some vehicles a bit out of its usual range. These included a 1953 Simplex motorcycle and a garish 1948 Chrysler Town & Country convertible once owned by the actor Leo Carrillo of the 'Cisco Kid' TV series, that had a Texas longhorn head mounted on the hood. The longhorn's eyes even lit up, blinking left or right to signal turns. "Such a unique vehicle," the auctioneer, Charlie Ross, said with understatement.

At RM, notable deals included the $781,000 paid for a 1991 Ferrari F40 Berlinetta bought new by Lee A. Iacocca, the onetime Chrysler chairman, and the $990,000 sale of a 1959 BMW 507 roadster - one of only 251 built.

Barrett-Jackson, long considered a specialist in 1950s and '60s American sports and muscle cars, extended its reach in the other direction. The company's seven-figure sales - nine in all - included prewar classics from Daimler, Duesenberg and Isotta Fraschini. The high-end cars of Barrett-Jackson's new Salon Offering Collection are part of what it called the 5000 series, named for the special lot numbers assigned to them. These cars, which carried reserves of at least $500,000, included the Tucker and a 1947 Bentley Mark VI from the collection of Ron Pratte, a Phoenix-area businessman.

Thirty-five percent of the buyers at Barrett-Jackson's auctions were first-timers. "Businessmen are seeing how much potential there is in putting money into classic cars," Mr. Jackson said. "Where else are you going to put your money - in a bank?"

No small part of the Barrett-Jackson event's appeal is based on its six days of nationally televised programming on the Speed cable TV channel. "The 5000 Series cars brought in some excitement - and we are all about excitement," Mr. Jackson said. ""We could do small, European-style, one-day events only for a small, select group of high-end cars. But we prefer the large-scale American-style events. It's a lifestyle event now, with tours of the Phoenix area for our people who come in from out of town. We take the wives - more than 100 of them this year - shopping, golfing and to the casino. We have dinner and receptions. So do our sponsors."

On the other hand, the auction house is getting very picky about the vehicles it accepts, Mr. Jackson said. "We turned down a lot of cars this time." Cars were rejected, Mr. Jackson said, for not being in sale-ready condition; for the type of restoration or modifications done; and for those of questionable provenance. "When the amount of money we're talking about goes up, like it has, we see more phonies trying to get in," he said. "We have researchers who look very carefully into the claims of the consignors. If we find something that can't be substantiated, we bounce it back." Examples of questionable vehicles cited by Mr. Jackson include Pontiac Tempests that had been turned into GTOs and big-block Corvettes.

Surprising amounts were paid, particularly at Barrett-Jackson, for so-called resto-mods. These are not authentic classics, but modified vehicles - for instance, a 1957 Chevrolet gutted mechanically and fitted with a modern powertrain and suspension. "In some cases, these cars are getting prices that exceed even the values of the original versions of the cars," Mr. Jackson said. "These are collectibles you can actually use and drive."

Transformer

SACREBLEU! A Frenchman has found fame 20 years after pulling off the most unlikely conversion in motoring history. Emile Leray has become an internet sensation after photographs emerged showing how he dismantled a Citroen 2CV and turned it into a Mad Max-style motorbike after becoming stranded in the Moroccan desert.

The story of how he did it reads like a real-life version of a Top Gear challenge (think of the amphibious car). But this time there were no production staff hovering in the background, and for Leray the only prize was survival.

His adventure was the subject of a short news item on French television in the 1990s, but it remained largely unknown until last month, when photographs of the conversion appeared on a motoring website. They quickly went viral. Leray has been dubbed a real-life MacGyver - a reference to the 1980s American TV action hero who built improbable crimefighting machines out of everyday materials - and feted as the most extreme mechanic in the world.

The fuss has left Leray, now 62, a little stunned. "They refer to Mad Max and MacGyver and I see that there is a popularity chart and it is going up, but I am indifferent. I don't seek fame," he says at his home in a small village in northwest France.

"At that time, when I did it, there was no internet and I didn't publicise it. The news didn't circulate as quickly, and that's why now it is spreading more quickly. It is strange."

The tale began in 1993 when Leray, then a 43-year-old retired electrician with a thirst for adventure, decided to drive his 2CV from the town of Tan-Tan, in southern Morocco, to a remote village in the middle of the desert. "I wanted to do it off road because I had travelled round Africa about 10 times, so I knew the region well and therefore had no concerns," he says. "I decided to do it in a 2CV because, although it is not a 4x4, it is tough. In Africa they call it the 'Steel Camel' because it goes everywhere - provided you drive it gently. One must not be rough. I obviously was too rough because I broke it."

After being turned back at a military checkpoint and deciding to take a detour through the desert, Leray hit one of the large rocks that litter the terrain. The impact bent one of the wheel arms - the part of the 2CV's suspension that attaches the wheel to the axle - rendering the car undrivable. "I couldn't repair it -it was impossible. It was a big part that holds the wheel and it was broken. You need to go to a garage to repair that." It was late afternoon and the sun was beating down. Leray says he weighed up his options. He was almost 20 miles from the nearest village and he had some supplies: dates, tea, sugar, tinned food and onions that he had bought from the market in Tan-Tan, as well as enough water for several days. But he knew that he wouldn't be able to walk dozens of miles across the desert. "I could not have gone back on foot - it was too far. I put myself in what one calls survival mode. I ate less; I monitored my supplies of water and of food to make them last as long as possible."

The solution came to him that afternoon. Though he was not a trained mechanic, Leray had been a keen stock-car racer in France, and had had to repair his car every time he rolled it or crashed. "It gave me good schooling in mechanics and how to find solutions for things. So I decided to convert the 2CV because I knew it was possible," he says. The next morning he began dismantling the car, using a basic hacksaw. He used the 2CV's shell to shelter from sandstorms. Working in short sleeves, he adapted a pair of socks to cover his arms and protect them from the hot sun. He shortened the chassis and reattached the axles and two of the wheels, installing the engine and gearbox in the middle.



"I thought I would be able to convert the car in three or four days, but it took much longer than that. It took me 12 days. Things were more difficult to make than I thought. The accelerator and the clutch were complicated to make. Because of that, it took a long time."



The most frightening moment came at the end of the final day, when he finally managed to start the contraption. "That was the moment when I was most scared. I started the engine and I released the clutch - but I released it too quickly. The bike reared up and then it nearly fell on me." With just a pint of water left, Leray finally began the ride back to civilisation. Progress was painfully slow: the heavy bike bumped over the terrain and Leray often lost balance on the seat, which was made from part of the car's rear bumper. Even worse, he had no brakes. "I fell often, and at the end of the first day a part came loose and I had to stop to fix it. But by that point night had fallen, so I slept next to my machine in the desert," he says. In the morning, before Leray could continue, he was picked up by the Moroccan military. Was he relieved to be rescued? "Almost. But they issued me with a fairly hefty fine because they felt that the registration documents for the 2CV no longer corresponded to the bike. In their minds it was an offence. It was very expensive."



Today he is modest about his achievement and keeps his self-made bike in a barn in his village. "I took great pleasure in doing it but I don't consider it extraordinary," he says. "It surprises lots of people, but I tell you the Africans do things that are much more impressive." Even so, the interest in his tale has given him another bright idea: he wants to return to the desert with a friend to try to recreate the conversion job on video.

"I hope it would show people what they are capable of. Many people don't dare go travelling because they are afraid of breaking down. You shouldn't be afraid. Anything is possible."

People Say They Want More Efficient Cars, but ...

IMAGINE you are stopped in the street by a clipboard-toting pollster, who asks whether health insurance should automatically cover all necessary procedures and medication, with no restrictions or co-payments? Nine out of ten people (if not all) would instantly answer yes. But had the respondents been warned beforehand that they would have to stump up an extra $10,000 for such coverage, the answer could easily have been a resounding no.

Sad to report, this kind of selective polling - in which only the benefits are mentioned so as achieve a desired result - is cropping up increasingly in the support of various agendas. Substitute motor manufacturers for health insurers and fuel efficiency for medical treatment in the thought experiment above, and you have the kind of 'grassroots justification' that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) are using to push through a doubling in the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) figure motor manufacturers must achieve or face stiff penalties. The new proposal requires the fleet-average for new vehicles sold in America to rise incrementally from today's 27mpg (8.7 litres/100km) to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.

The most effective endorsement for the new CAFE proposal comes from a national survey carried out last October by Consumer Reports (a highly respected non-profit organisation based in New York) which claimed that 93% of the 1,008 people interviewed by telephone wanted higher fuel economy and would pay extra for it. The survey results were released the day before the government announced its new CAFE proposal. Ever since, the poll has been considered hard evidence that the new CAFE proposal is widely supported by the American people.

Like all polls, when people are asked personal questions, they do not necessarily tell the whole truth. Indeed, most respondents provide the kind of answers they consider socially acceptable. In some cases (how often do you brush your teeth?) the response is inflated; in others (how much do you drink?) it is deflated. It is a well-known phenomenon, called 'social desirability response bias', which has been studied by sociologists and market researchers for decades and requires questionnaires to be structured in highly specific ways to minimise inbuilt biases.

"So, when consumers say fuel economy is extremely important, they are not lying," says Jeremy Anwyl, vice-chairman of Edmunds.com, the most popular source of independent car-buying advice used by American motorists. "The survey has just not allowed (or required) them to point out that other attributes are even more important."

Deciding what new car to purchase is a complicated undertaking, requiring all sorts of rational and emotional compromises. There are emotional factors to take into account, such as brand image, luxury, sportiness and appearance. Then there are physical features like comfort, number of seats, cargo space, body type and towing capacity. For most people, price and fuel economy represent costs.

In testifying before Congress last year, Mr Anwyl explained that "consumers are happy to pay less, or save fuel, but not if it means giving up features they deem important." A market simulation model that Edmunds has developed over the years indicates that fuel efficiency accounts on average for about 6% of the reason why consumers purchase a particular vehicle. Fuel efficiency only becomes important when petrol prices suddenly start climbing, but then declines in significance when pump prices stabilise or start to fall.

Here, then, is the conundrum: if the vast majority of motorists in America claim to want higher fuel economy and are prepared to pay for it, why are they not doing so? There is no shortage of cars already on the market capable of 40mpg or more. The Toyota Prius gets 50mpg on the EPA's combined cycle, while electric vehicles like the Chevrolet Volt and the Nissan Leaf deliver the equivalent of 60mpg and 99mpg respectively.

Yet few people are buying them. Despite large tax incentives for buyers, Volt and Leaf sales have fallen well short of even their manufacturers' modest expectations. Altogether, hybrid and electric vehicles account for only 2% of America's new car market. The government may mandate manufacturers to produce fuel-efficient vehicles, but it cannot mandate motorists to buy them.

The problem is their higher purchase price. Take the Toyota Camry, which is available in directly comparable hybrid and conventional forms. The hybrid version costs typically $3,400 (or 15%) more than the standard car, but achieves 13mpg (or 46%) better fuel economy. Even so, there have been few takers for the petrol sipper. Last year, Toyota sold over 313,000 ordinary versions of the Camry compared with fewer than 15,000 hybrid versions, notes Mr Anwyl.

The official line is that owners recover the premium on a hybrid or electric vehicle through lower running costs - with payback times of anything from four to seven years, depending on fuel prices. Unfortunately, American motorists tend to trade their new vehicles in after three to four years, and so do not collect anything like the full payback. Besides, the Edmunds model of consumer-buying habits (with 18m visitors a month, the website collects more data on such transactions than even the manufacturers) shows that consumers demand a payback period of 12 months or less.

What, then, to make of the new CAFE proposal? Achieving a fleet-average of 54.5mpg is doable, say motor manufacturers, but it will not be cheap. The NHTSA puts the cost of the extra technology (eight-speed transmissions, direct-fuel injection, turbo-charging, hybrid drives, larger batteries, electric power steering, low-rolling-resistance tyres, better aerodynamics, heat-reflecting paint and solar panels) needed to achieve the target at a modest $2,000 per vehicle, with a lifetime saving on fuel costs of $6,600 (provided fuel prices do not decline).

At the other extreme, the National Automobile Dealers Association reckons all the additional technology needed to achieve the 2025 goal will add $5,000 to the price of a new vehicle. Take somewhere in between - say, the $3,400 premium that Camry hybrid owners pay - and any lifetime savings through lower running costs look even more difficult to recoup.

Much, of course, depends on what fuel prices do over the ensuing years. And that includes the price of coal and natural gas as well as oil. Remember, most of the new electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids that carmakers will have to build to meet the new CAFE requirements will be recharged overnight using electricity from power stations that mostly burn dirty coal or (if people are lucky) cleaner natural gas or uranium oxide.

The good news is that the bonanza in domestic discoveries of natural gas should help keep the lid on fossil-fuel prices for years to come. And if fuel prices come down in real terms, that will hurt sales of fuel-efficient vehicles.

Indeed, the way the NHTSA and the EPA have skewed the relief manufacturers get on vehicles of different sizes will pretty well ensure that American motorists will, once again, opt for trucks and SUVs rather than Prius-like vehicles. The deal done to buy off the industry's opposition to the new CAFE requirements granted manufacturers special credits for certain fuel-saving technologies. Meanwhile, pick-up trucks and larger SUVs were given what effectively amounts to a free pass.

The degree to which a vehicle has to comply with the NHTSA's fuel-efficiency and the EPA's carbon-emission requirements depends on the vehicle's 'footprint' on the road. The larger the area (measured by multiplying the vehicle's track by its wheel-base), the greater the relief.

This was the fix that got Detroit's big three - which still rely on trucks and SUVs for the bulk of their profits - on board. No wonder Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz have complained bitterly about the deal, while General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have now come out in support of the new CAFE proposal. An added sweetener for American manufacturers and trade unions was to exclude credits for the extremely frugal diesel engines that European carmakers have spent billions perfecting.

All told, then, will motorists across the country be getting 50mpg or more by 2025? Hardly. For a start, there is a world of difference between the testing methods used by the NHTSA for CAFE purposes and the EPA for determining a vehicle's fuel-economy figures for the window sticker that new vehicles must display in dealers' showrooms. Because of the difference, consumers will be paying for technology needed to achieve a CAFE average of 54.5mpg, but will be buying vehicles that achieve a real-world average of around 36mpg.

That assumes the CAFE target will still be in place by then. Because there is a limit to the number of years ahead for which the NHTSA can set fuel-economy standards, the new CAFE target will have to be reviewed by all parties in 2019. By then, much could have changed - in terms of energy price and availability, as well as engineering. Though a long shot, a breakthrough in storage technology would alter everything.

And by then there will, of course, be a new Administration in the White House with, quite possibly, an entirely different agenda concerning energy and the environment. As much as anything, insiders reckon the possibility of being let off the hook by a new Administration was the clincher that persuaded the motor industry to go along for the ride.

Cars With Record Players

Chrysler Record Player 1

Chrysler Record Player 2

You Are What You Drive

AFTER 11 years of daily use, the family kidmobile is nearing the end of its economic life. Meticulously maintained, it still runs fine. Or, rather, it does now the air-conditioning system has been overhauled - at greater expense than the car is actually worth. With the vehicle fully depreciated, the annual cost of ownership has been minimal for the past four or five years, but is now set to rise - as one electronic module after another can be expected to give up the ghost and need replacing at $1,000 or more a pop. Sadly, the time has come to contemplate putting the trusty old war-horse out to pasture. But what on earth to replace it with?

Purchasing a new car is the sort of emotionally draining experience your correspondent dreads. Perhaps that is why he keeps his cars so long: he has owned one of the two old Lotuses in his garage for 40 years, having built it from a kit in 1972; the other one he has had for the best part of 24. As a replacement for the kidmobile, he knows what he ought to buy, but is torn over what he would like to have instead.

There is a clever compatibility tool called My Car Match on Edmunds.com, a popular site for American motorists seeking advice on what to buy and how much to pay. The algorithm presents users with a series of questions about their needs and preferences - how many people the vehicle will have to carry, how much luggage, what type of vehicle, what price range. Each time, users are asked to select the best out of three vehicles presented, while the list of possibilities is repeatedly refined.

After going through all the hoops, your correspondent was told he should buy a Kia Soul, when he had hoped it would recommend at least a more up-scale Hyundai Genesis. So much for inflated aspirations.

Car buyers should examine their needs rather than their wants, Philip Reed of Edmunds.com points out. "In too many cases, people choose a car for its styling or because it is a trendy favourite," he notes. But that implies consumers can easily ignore all the subliminal signals coming from those structures in the brain that are responsible for predicting the outcome of decisions and providing emotional rewards.

In his book 'Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars', Paul Ingrassia, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, pointed out how American culture has long been a tug of war between the practical and the pretentious, the frugal and the flamboyant, hot-wings and haute cuisine. Your correspondent believes that applies not just to America, but is probably universal - a crucial aspect, no less, of human nature.

More than anything else people purchase, a car broadcasts so much about who they are - or, rather, who they like to think they are. The whole business is fraught with stereotypes, often amusing, rarely meaningful, but once in a while spot on. For instance, Bentley nowadays implies 'footballer's wife'. Cadillac screams 'old codger trying to look cool'. Honda mutters something about being reliable but boring. Mercedes-Benz says simply 'taxi' in Europe and the Middle East, and 'too old for a BMW' in America. Porsche is code for 'desperate male having a mid-life crisis'.

With 45% of the cars on American roads being imports, there is also the nationality of the car to consider. Long ago, in his extremely amusing book 'How to Repair Your Foreign Car: A Guide for the Beginner, Your Wife, and the Mechanically Inept', Dick O'Kane listed some of the quirks of foreign cars and what such things implied about their owners. Thus, the British build cars that need to be tinkered with regularly. The Swedes make strapping vehicles that will ride over, under or through any obstacle. The Germans manufacture technological marvels, which, when they break, have to be taken to a high priest from the factory for repair. The French, ah the French, who can understand the French?

For most motorists, the trickiest part of buying a new vehicle is deciding which brand. The one that commands the greatest loyalty in America today is (no kidding) Hyundai. In this year's annual survey of car-brand loyalty by JD Power and Associates, a market-research firm in California, 64% of Hyundai owners said they would replace their existing vehicles with another of the same make. Ford, Honda, BMW and Kia were runners up in the loyalty stakes.

But brand loyalty is not what it used to be. Female buyers have become particularly fickle. So have the well-heeled who buy executive and luxury models. However, it is the young - the Gen X and Gen Y buyers - who are the most capricious. Nowadays, over half of motorists replace their present vehicles with another make. They do so because either the manufacturer does not offer the type they want, or they have been put off by a bad experience with their current car.

Another reason why loyalty has lost ground is because, these days, it is rarely rewarded. Existing customers can pay thousands of dollars more than someone switching from another make. Brand loyalists tend to haggle less, and car salesmen take advantage of the fact. Moral: if you want another Ford, do not drive up to the dealership in your existing one.

Loyalty aside, what a brand actually says about a carmaker is quite a different matter. If a brand does its job well, it links the consumer to the product being purchased by building an emotional image or bridge between the two. Either way, the product's brand-image and the consumer's self-image merge into a single entity that rewards the buyer with feelings of certainty and satisfaction.

The car-brand perception survey conducted annually by Consumer Reports National Research Centre in New York scores how consumers view each brand in seven particular categories: safety, quality, value, performance, environment, design and innovation. Combining the scores for each category gives an overall ranking that reflects the image consumers have in their minds of the manufacturer. The survey is reckoned to be particularly good at shedding light on what brands consumers are likely to purchase.

This year, the survey of brands people are most likely to buy once again lists Ford, Toyota, Chevrolet and Honda (in that order) at the top of the list. These four brands were singled out by more than half the people who participated in the survey. Even so, all the leading brands have seen their scores slip over the past year as high petrol prices, the woeful economy, huge recalls and other glitches have all taken their toll on brand values. And while safety used to be the most important consideration, followed by quality, value and performance, penny-pinching customers now prize low operating cost and reliability above all else.

So, what car should your correspondent buy? For a start, he needs five seats, with enough cargo space for the odd weekend trip. As the bulk of the driving is done in heavy traffic, an automatic transmission is essential. Neither all-wheel drive nor four-wheel drive (they are different) is necessary, as he rarely goes off road deliberately and has not encountered snow in ages. His brain says be sensible and buy a new Ford Fusion, which will be in the showrooms shortly.

But his heart lusts after the 1965 S-type rotting away in a local Jaguar repair shop. He had a second-hand 3.4-litre S-type (the current kidmobile's direct ancestor) half a lifetime ago, and ran it lovingly until both he and the car were broke. He has half a mind to do the same again.

Incentives To Change Driving Behavior

London, Singapore, Stockholm and a few other cities around the world battle heavy traffic with a congestion charge, a stiff fee for driving in crowded areas at peak hours. But drivers generally hate the idea, and efforts to impose it in this country have failed.

Balaji Prabhakar, a professor of computer science at Stanford University, thinks he has a better way.

A few years ago, trapped in an unending traffic jam in Bangalore, India, he reflected that there was more than one way to get drivers to change their behavior. Congestion charges are sticks; why not try a carrot?

So this spring, with a $3 million research grant from the federal Department of Transportation, Stanford deployed a new system designed by Dr. Prabhakar's group. Called Capri, for Congestion and Parking Relief Incentives, it allows people driving to the notoriously traffic-clogged campus to enter a daily lottery, with a chance to win up to an extra $50 in their paycheck, just by shifting their commute to off-peak times.

The program has proved so popular that it is to be expanded soon to also cover parking.

Amaya Odiaga, the director of business operations for Stanford's physical education department, now drives to campus a few minutes earlier and says she has won just $15. But a co-worker got $50 - creating a competitive atmosphere that makes the program fun, Ms. Odiaga said.

Better yet, Ms. Odiaga's commute now takes as little as 7 minutes, down from 25 minutes at peak hours.

Dr. Prabhakar is a specialist in designing computer networks and has conducted a variety of experiments in using incentives to get people to change their behavior in driving, taking public transit, parking and even adopting a more active lifestyle. Unlike congestion pricing, which is mandatory for everyone and usually requires legislation, "incentives can be started incrementally and are voluntary," he said.

Moreover, systems based on incentives can offer a huge advantage in simplicity. Until recently, the Stanford system required sensors around campus to detect signals from radio-frequency identification tags that participants carried in their cars. But the need for such an infrastructure has vanished now that so many drivers carry smartphones with GPS chips or other locaters.

Administrators can use the network to set up a centralized Web-based service to manage any number of incentive campaigns.

"Through smartphones we're getting more at ease about fine-grained information about space and time," said Frank Kelly, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge in England who specializes in traffic networks. "This is possible because information and communications systems are becoming cheaper and cheaper."

Samuel I. Schwartz, a transportation consultant and former New York City traffic commissioner, says a smartphone-based system is inevitable, though he predicts it will be used for congestion pricing as well as incentives.

"Ultimately we will be charged, or money will be added to our accounts, by using the cloud infrastructure," he said. "It's so precise that you will be able to charge people for how much of Fifth Avenue they use and for how long a period. In Christmas season you may decide to charge them $10 to use Fifth Avenue for each block."

In New York City, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's plan for congestion pricing died in 2008 for lack of support from the state Legislature. Pravin Varaiya, an expert on transportation systems at the University of California, Berkeley, said enforcement costs would have been huge, adding that "carrots, as opposed to sticks, frequently work very well."

Still, Charles Komanoff, a transportation expert who has designed a computer model of New York traffic, said he had reservations about such a system as an alternative to congestion pricing.

"The incentives will be far too small," he wrote in an e-mail, adding: "You really do need big disincentives (big sticks). Little carrots won't do the job of changing drivers' decisions" in New York or in San Francisco."

Dr. Prabhakar said congestion pricing and his incentive system need not be mutually exclusive, and he noted that highway congestion was an example of nonlinear behavior, in which even a small reduction in vehicles at a given time - 10 percent or less - can have a big effect on traffic flow.

And conversely, added Dr. Kelly, the mathematician, "when the system is close to critical levels, very small increases in traffic can create time delays for everyone."

Dr. Prabhakar's experiments have offered different kinds of incentives, from airline-style reward points to lottery cash prizes. Now his system is poised to reach a much larger audience.

Singapore is considering a system he and his students designed that offers lottery participation or a fare discount to public transit riders who travel at off-peak times. A trial run begun in January lowered rush-hour ridership by more than 10 percent. (Given a choice between discounts and lottery, riders overwhelmingly chose the lottery.)

Bill Reinert, an advanced technology manager at Toyota, says incentives are no panacea. "Incentives the government gives you" to buy hybrid vehicles "are a good way not to establish markets," he said. But he added: "Do incentives work? Yes. I fly 300,000 miles a year on United."

The Stanford experiment adds a social network component to the lottery, in effect making it a game where friends can observe one another's 'good' behavior. The researchers say this tends to reinforce changes in behavior and individual commitment. Next fall, the university plans to expand the system to encourage people to park farther from the busiest parking structures.

The idea of using incentives to change social and personal behavior has grown increasingly popular. In their 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, the economist Richard H. Thaler and the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein argued that organizational structures could be created that guide people toward better behavior.

Dr. Thaler noted that variable tolls, like those used on the Hudson River crossings in New York at different times of day, "are clearly an attempt to shift people's incentives." Of traffic systems like Stanford's, he said, "this is just as efficient."

Dr. Prabhakar's first experiment was in Bangalore in 2008, when he created a system to encourage employees at the software company Infosys to choose different travel times to its suburban campus. The system significantly lowered congestion.

More recently, he worked with Accenture, a business services company, to set up a system that used pedometers to measure the number of footsteps more than 3,000 employees took each day, encouraging them to walk more for better health. The campaign, called 'Steptacular,' included a social network component and a Web-based game to add a random element to the incentives; it handed out $238,000 in rewards.

Dr. Prabhakar said the power of his method was that only a small change could have a drastic effect.

"This is one of the nicer problems," he said. "You don't have to change everyone's behavior; in fact, it's better if you don’t."

Pimp My Van

First it was stretch limos, then it was enormous Hummers and more recently it has been the eco-friendly Toyota Prius — but now Hollywood has turned to an even more surprising means of transport. Vans have become the must-have accessory for stars including Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé and Will Smith, but rather than boasting about their wheels, celebrities are using them to drive around incognito. The best-kept secret on Sunset Boulevard, these vans are the perfect way to fool the paparazzi and avoid flaunting one’s wealth at a time when most people are tightening their belts.

The vans aren’t quite what they seem, though. Although they look ordinary from the outside, they pack more technology and creature comforts than your average living room, including airline-style leather reclining seats complete with massage functions, built-in iPad consoles, HD plasma screens connected to the web — enabling video on demand — and even refrigerated cupholders.

It is not just in Hollywood that the craze is taking off: in Britain one company says that it has been inundated with orders for the vehicles from businessmen and sportsmen keen to keep a low profile in austerity Britain without sacrificing the opulence of more traditional luxury cars. “They just want a little bit of privacy,” says Dayne Bartlett, owner of Touch of Class, a south Wales company that specialises in converting vans such as the Volkswagen Transporter and Mercedes Sprinter.

“No one really knows who’s inside, and that’s just the way they like it. We’ve done vans for at least four British celebrities that we can’t talk about.”

One of the company’s customers is the film director Guy Ritchie. Bartlett redesigned the interior of his white van as a gentlemen’s club, with brown leather armchairs, walnut flooring, brass fixtures and a tweed roof lining. “That was exceptional,” says Bartlett, “but the key thing is that we can do almost anything, from a £2,000 job all the way up to whatever your budget might be.”

In America the conversions are even more extreme. Justin Bieber’s new Mercedes Sprinter “party van” has three HD video screens and a massive sound system, while the rapper Snoop Dogg — who has now taken to calling himself Snoop Lion — has a gleaming black van containing a fully functioning mobile recording studio.

“Part of the Sprinter’s appeal is that it’s more anonymous than a Cadillac — it doesn’t attract undue attention,” says Howard Becker, founder of Becker Automotive Design in Los Angeles. He has converted dozens of the Mercedes vans into inconspicuous “JetVans”, so called because he aspires to match the quality and ambience of a sleek corporate jet. His clients have included Tiger Woods, Jay-Z and Eminem.

According to Becker, the craze for vans started when Hollywood stars began to experience limo fatigue. “An American stretch limo is so passé these days,” he says. “It’s ugly and uncomfortable and has become something schoolkids take to their prom night.” The same goes for Hummers. Even hybrids are losing their lustre. Travelling incognito in a van allows celebrities to criss-cross town in comfort without hordes of paparazzi on their tails.

The Sprinter van is big enough to seat up to seven in massaging seats with electric foot rests, personal HD TVs and desks with mobile broadband. Alternatively, musicians spending a lot of time on the road can opt for a micro-sized mobile home interior. The R&B producer The-Dream installed a shower, sink, cooker, microwave, coffee maker and bed in his Sprinter.

Where the famous go, the rich soon follow. One of Becker’s corporate clients requested a webcam and exercise bike so he could spin away while video-conferencing employees from a traffic jam. Other buyers, including some Middle Eastern royals, insist on armour plating, GPS tracking and other, unspecified, “emergency equipment”.

Prices for converting a Sprinter range from £2,000 for a couple of extra seats to £200,000 for the full JetVan treatment. Installing electronics such as massive flatscreen TVs, surround-sound systems, LED lighting and 4G-connected computers means adding circuit breakers, extra batteries and a beefed-up air-conditioning system.

Deluxe fittings such as electrically cooled seats and rare wood finishes can bump the total higher still. Becker even claims he has developed a ventilation system that can prevent car sickness by pumping bursts of filtered fresh air into the rear of the van.

For the ultra-rich, there can never be enough luxury or privacy. Becker is watching Google’s experiments with robotic cars eagerly. “I can’t wait for vans that drive themselves. It’s an interesting long-term vision,” he says.

The danger is that by the time robot chauffeurs arrive, luxury vans will have fallen from fashion. Already, a company called Brilliant Transportation has fleets of Sprinters for hire in New York and LA. The vans boast leather recliners, wi-fi, satellite TV, twin HD screens and hardwood floors, and cost from £130 an hour. Schoolgirls on their way to prom nights cannot be far off.

Customised Luxury Cars

For the super-rich, owning the latest luxury car is not enough. Now they are ordering paint jobs to match their pot plants and upholstering their seats in salmon.

Three of the Rolls-Royces in Michael Fux's fleet

Those living around the Prime One Twelve restaurant in Miami Beach, Florida, are used to seeing the odd exotic car. After all, its clientele includes Cameron Diaz, Kim Kardashian, Bill Clinton and other wealthy types.

Lamborghini or Bugatti? Park it round the back with the others. No, it takes something special to draw crowds of onlookers - something like a bright purple Rolls-Royce convertible with yellow leather interior. Michael Fux, its multi-millionaire owner and a regular at the restaurant, has dozens of similarly outlandish cars among his of collection of 125.

While most people worry about arriving at a party in the same outfit as another guest, the mega-rich have nightmares about arriving in the same car, and increasingly they want something unique.

"I gave the manufacturers a challenge," says Fux, 69, who made his money in mattresses (see below). "I saw a purple pansy, and I gave it to Rolls-Royce and said, "I want you to match this"." The result was another one-off purple Phantom Drophead, with a white leather interior and a chrome nameplate stating that the car was built for Fux. He has now ordered a McLaren MP4-12C Spider in the same shade - once the company had signed an agreement that it wouldn't supply the same colour to anybody else.

"I told them I want the new P1, but I haven't worked out the colour I want it yet," says Fux. "Hopefully I will be ordering the new Enzo Ferrari, too. I'm planning to go to Italy to look at it."

Before those cars, he will take delivery of two new Ferrari F12s: a standard version and a customised version that will take up to a year to design and build.

High-rolling customers such as Fux have boosted demand for personalised cars, defying the world economy. Rolls-Royce has tripled the size of its bespoke design department in 18 months; Ferrari's Tailor-Made service, launched last year, now accounts for 16% of all vehicle sales.

High-profile customers include Eric Clapton, who spent £3m on a one-off bespoke Ferrari, and Michael Stoschek, a German car enthusiast, who is thought to have spent even more on developing a single modern descendant of the Lancia Stratos rally car.

Has austerity changed things? No. The latest generation of recession-busting hypercars is likely to drive the extravagance even further. McLaren's new P1 supercar is due out next year with a price tag of about £800,000. Fux won't be among those looking through the options list in McLaren's catalogue. Instead, he'll decide what specification he wants - perhaps one to match his favourite raspberry shirt - and order it direct from the Woking factory.

Earlier this year McLaren unveiled its X-1, a one-off car designed for a mystery client by its special operations division, set up to meet the rising demand for this kind of bespoke work.

The car is so different from any other model that it had its own road test programme. McLaren said that it created a mood book for the customer, which included "inspiring images from which the design spirit of this unique car would be derived". The images included classic cars, but there were also pages with an Airstream caravan, a Montblanc pen, a grand piano, Audrey Hepburn in black and white ... and an aubergine. "The client liked the shiny texture of the finish," said Frank Stephenson, the design director.

Pimping cars for the stars is a bandwagon that all high-end manufacturers are keen to climb aboard. Gavin Hartley, head of bespoke design at Rolls-Royce, says he has more than 1,000 buyers a year who personalise their cars. The modifications are made on the production line. There are now six designers in his department, up from two 18 months ago, and 90% of Phantom saloons are sold with bespoke work. Six years ago it was 50%.

It's good news for Rolls-Royce’s finances, although the company is loath to say exactly how much customers typically spend. "You could be budgeting 30-40% on top of the cost of the [£276,000] car in broad terms," says Hartley. "The vulgarity of cost we try to avoid, really."

Tailoring the car is "entertainment and fun" for clients, he declares. Some of the more garish choices have involved alligator leather trim, initialled headrests and big-screen televisions in the back. He once designed a car apparently suited for the most expensive teddy bears' picnic in the world.

"There was a customer from the Middle East who came to us some time ago," says Hartley. "It was a Drophead coupe with a tartan boot trim. We did a walking stick, bespoke Thermos flasks and a binoculars holder. We supplied the customer with fitted luggage, a picnic hamper and a bag for his wellington boots, even."

The typical customer doesn't care whether their car is seen as tasteful or not, says Hartley. "They are not really bothered about what the next person thinks," he says. "They are doing it for personal reasons."

Bespoke work is becoming a moneyspinner even for the makers of cars previously renowned for their practicality. Buyers of the new Range Rover will be offered more personalisation options than ever before, including any colour scheme under the sun - at a cost - and 22in wheels, a popular after-market addition to the outgoing model.

"If after-market companies are doing something, then we want to do it properly," says Nick Rogers, director of Range Rover programmes. "It makes sense if we can offer more of the features that customers want."

BMW's Individual service has also seen more customers wanting features such as gold buttons, salmon-skin leather, inlaid flower designs studded with Swarovski crystals and leather dog baskets. One owner wanted wood trim from a tree that had been growing in their estate. Franca Sozzani, the editor of Italian Vogue, commissioned a 7-series saloon with a small bookcase between the rear seats, so that her magazines wouldn't slide around.

Mercedes has produced cars with an interior to match a shade of lipstick, and pink Bentleys are a favourite of Paris Hilton and footballers' wives.

Perhaps the ultimate guarantee of a bespoke car is when the manufacturer includes in the price the tools that were used to build it, thus ensuring that other wealthy customers can't own an identical car. Such was the case with Clapton’s Ferrari. He took delivery of his one-off SP12 EC model in May. It is based on the current 458 Italia coupe, but with a new body inspired by Clapton's favourite Ferrari, the 512 BB from the 1970s.



Eric Clapton with his £3m one-off Ferrari SP12 EC

He has spoken about the car only once, telling the official Ferrari magazine it was "one of the most satisfying things I've ever done".

But while these one-off cars solve some problems experienced by tycoons, they can create a new one. "I'll think about what car I'm going to drive the day before," says Fux. "It can be a difficult decision."

Foam and fortune: the baron of bespoke

Michael Fux, a 69-year-old multi-millionaire, made his fortune from selling memory foam mattresses and pillows. His rags-to-riches story began when he and his family emigrated to America from Cuba in 1958. He worked his way up the sales ladder at department stores before spotting an opportunity in bedding.

Nine years after founding Sleep Innovations in 1996, Fux (pronounced "fewks") was riding high with annual sales of £220m. His company was bought by a private equity firm and though the price was never disclosed it gave Fux enough cash to start another memory foam company - and to create one of the world's most expensive car collections.

"When it comes to Aston, Ferrari, Rolls-Royce and McLaren, they will do all kinds of things," says Fux. "You've gotta be willing to pay for it, but you can get whatever you want."

This claim is backed up by his fleet of 125 cars, most tailored to his specification. There are seven Ferrari F430 sports cars in different colours; a pale green Ferrari 458 Spider with matching pale green interior; and several Phantom Dropheads including one in cherry red with a carbon fibre trim inside.

"I like the idea that a car will last for many, many years," says Fux. "I try to envisage a car 50, 100 years from now and for people to look at that car and think, "Wow that's something really special."

"The cost could run anywhere from £100,000 to £300,000. At Rolls-Royce, I tell them what I want and we don't discuss price until the car is built."

Supercars

Data and Money and Transport

Advances in real-time data acquisition, processing, and display technologies means that it is possible to design a toll road that can continually change prices to control how many cars are on the road and how fast they are going. These “hot lanes“ have just been opened along a part of the Washington, D.C., Beltway, the 10-lane, traffic-infested artery that to normal humans is a metaphorical boundary between the real, outside-the-Beltway world and the weird, political one on the inside. (For those of us who live around Washington and must drive on it, however, the Beltway is very concrete indeed, a daily flirtation with delay and frustration, homicidal instincts, and death itself.)

At a cost of $2 billion, a private sector partnership (which gets to keep the tolls) has built a 14-mile-long, four-laned section of highway, parallel to the main lanes of the toll-free Beltway, and has guaranteed to the state of Virginia that it will always keep traffic moving at no less that 45 mph along its length. They do this by continuously monitoring the number of cars (which must be equipped with EZ-Pass transponders) and their speed, and by raising toll prices as necessary to keep the number of cars on the road at a level that will allow the speed to stay at or above the guaranteed minimum. The dynamic toll prices are displayed on huge signs near the entrances to the smart-highway lanes, so drivers get to decide at the last minute whether they want to spend the money to go faster or not. As the traffic on the toll-free Beltway lanes gets worse, some drivers will be willing to spend more to go faster. The worse the traffic is, the more they’ll have to spend. (In the early days of this new technology, numerous accidents were caused by drivers trying to decide how much they were willing to pay, but no doubt this initial problem will sort itself out as people get used to driving-while-economically-rational.)

Of course economic rationality benefits some more than others. As long ago as 1973, philosopher Ivan Illich recognized that speed was an issue at the intersection of technology and justice. In his extended essay “Energy and Equity,” Illich observed presciently, if somewhat obscurely, that the quest for speed in transportation was an unrecognized domain in which technological advance itself led to increasing inequity of distribution of social and economic opportunity.

Unchecked speed is expensive, and progressively fewer can afford it. Each increment in the velocity of a vehicle results in an increase in the cost of propulsion and track construction and—most dramatically—in the space the vehicle devours while it is on the move. Past a certain threshold of energy consumption for the fastest passenger, a world-wide class structure of speed capitalists is created.

The Beltway smart-lanes perfectly illustrate Illich’s proposition in a technological application that he might never have imagined. Market rationality imposed on roadways that all people depend on for their livelihoods and social lives means that poor people will be increasingly required to travel more slowly than those with more money. Relative to the toll-paying classes, they will have less time to sleep, or for their families, or for their work. This is a problem that acts synergistically with other disadvantages, such as the realities that poor people often have long commutes, because they cannot afford to live in areas of high real-estate prices where many jobs are located, and that they often must drive old, less efficient automobiles, and so have to pay more for fuel.

The technology for the Beltway smart lanes is an impressive early example of how rapidly growing data collection and management capabilities can be applied in real-time to manage complex, if narrow, social problems—and, if we’re not attentive (which we seem not to be)—to reinforce, in another small way, the embedded inequities that are growing more serious and apparently intractable in American society.

Rod Stewart and His cars  

THE truth about me and cars is that, mechanically speaking, I don’t really know one end from the other. They keep asking me to go on Top Gear, but I’m worried they’re going to start talking to me about cam shafts and drivetrains and using words such as “torque”, at which point I’d be lost.

I’ve always loved cars, though: driving them, the look of them, the messages they send, the way they make you feel. And there were very few points in the formative years of my career when the desire to own a particular car wasn’t a big motivating factor. Sometimes it was the motivating factor. That was the ethos I grew up with: work hard, save up, buy the car you wanted. So I did.

It wasn’t until 1967, when I was with the Jeff Beck Group, that I felt flush enough to get my first car: a second-hand Mini Traveller with the old basket-weave-type panelling on the side. This was much to the relief of Pete Saunders, one of Jeff’s roadies, who had the job of driving me and the similarly car-free Ronnie Wood all over London. Pete was so keen to be shorn of taxi duties that when I told him I hadn’t yet passed the driving test (I had only had lessons up to that point), he volunteered to take it for me.

In the days before photocard licences, this was a fairly simple deception to pull off. So one morning, Pete set off to the test centre, signed in as Mr Roderick Stewart of Highgate, north London, and took my test. And I passed, I’m pleased to say. To this day I have never taken a driving test in Britain. (Note to the authorities: I took a driving test in California, upon my emigration to America in 1975, which in turn qualifies me to drive in Britain. I’m completely legal now — that’s what I’m saying.)

So I bought the Mini, and Pete was happy and so was I — extremely happy. There’s nothing like the feeling of owning your first car. It spells freedom. For me, in the ranks of the great breakthroughs of growing-up, car ownership is right at the top. Forget drinking and shagging. They’re great, but driving makes everything available. That’s not to say I did forget drinking, of course. I’m sorry to relate that we did an awful lot of drink-driving in those days and, worse still, we thought almost nothing of it. Inconceivable now.

I used to look after that Mini so well. I put black paint on its tyres and attached a little GB sticker to the back to cover up a small patch of rust. And I wired two enormous speakers to the radio and stood them on the back seat, where they remained perfectly happily until you put your foot on the brake and the whole lot slid onto the floor.

Today’s children would be baffled, but getting audible music of any kind into a car in the 1960s and early 1970s was a Herculean struggle: a constant battle with portable cassette players that wouldn’t play loudly enough and tape machines that jumped and skipped when you went over bumps and chewed your music to pieces.

Of course, I realised in due course that even with big speakers on its back seat a Mini Traveller wasn’t exactly a four-wheeled babe magnet. So I took a big step up with my next car and bought, circa 1968, a white Triumph Spitfire: a proper twin-seat sports car, with fake magnesium alloy wheels, go-faster stripes down the side and a GT oil sticker on the back. I trimmed it inside by taking a manky old fox-fur coat and cutting it up to fit across the transmission hump and sticking squares of fur on the floor for mats. Beautiful. It was like sitting inside a taxidermist’s workshop.

If I had a girl with me, I would pull the choke out at traffic lights, flood the engine a bit, then bung the choke back in when the lights changed and leave everyone standing. One time I tried to do this, I revved the car so hard that one of the fake alloys sprang off and rolled away into the gutter. There are few things as humiliating as having to get out at the lights, pick up your fake mag alloy and put it in the back of the car.

And then, in an epochal moment around the spring of 1971, with the Faces doing well and money coming in from my first solo albums, I splashed out on a Lamborghini: a Miura S, with big air intakes on the bonnet, huge bug-eye headlamps and switches overhead, like in the cockpit of a plane. It was the beginning of a long and expensive love affair with the brand.

This Miura was a considerable investment: £6,500. Bear in mind that the first house I had just bought, in Muswell Hill, north London, had cost me only £5,000. So for a while there my car was worth more than my house. And there was no off-road parking, so I had to leave it on the street. Small wonder I couldn’t sleep at night. If there was so much as a bump in the night, I’d be up and at the window, checking the car. I kept it covered in plastic and even went so far as to put little red plastic cones around it, so that no one could park too close and put a dink in it.

Don’t bother to ask me how it handled in the wet. I never took it out if it was raining. It was far too expensive for that. It gave me more problems than every other vehicle I had owned, combined. You needed leg muscles of steel to get the clutch down, and it was constantly overheating. But I loved the feeling that owning the car gave me: this is what I worked for; this is mine.

Soon after this I acquired a white Rolls-Royce, just for the heck of it. It was while driving this car down Haverstock Hill one Sunday evening in 1971 that I heard on the radio that Maggie May had gone to No 1. At which point I turned round and went all the way back to my mum and dad’s house, 24 Kenwood Road, in Highgate, and gave them both a big hug to celebrate. Note how, before Maggie May even, I had the money for a Roller and a Lambo. It shows you how much I saved up.

I’ve only had a couple of proper accidents, both in Los Angeles. The most memorable took place in a grey Miura on Sunset Boulevard in the early hours of one morning in 1982. My passenger and I were, as I recall, stoned out of our tiny minds. Somewhere near the point where Tower Records used to be, somebody turned across me in a pick-up truck. The Lambo basically slid right under it, back as far as its roof, so that the view out of the windscreen was entirely filled by the underside of this truck.

The driver of the pick-up truck got out and I began to panic because he was enormous — a mountain of a man with a long, bushy beard, like one of the guys out of ZZ Top. Maybe he was one of the guys out of ZZ Top. Anyway, whoever he was — joy of joys — I realised he was stoned too. And he said, “I think we’d both better get out of here quick, don’t you?”

I said, “You’re absolutely right, my friend.” So we extracted our cars and went our separate ways.

Incredibly, I’ve only ever been carjacked once. This, too, was on Sunset Boulevard, in April 1982. I part-owned an empty building that was going to be turned into a restaurant — although the project never came together — and in the meantime I was using the place as a lock-up for storage. I drove down there one morning in a black Porsche 911 Turbo. With me was Kimberly, my eldest child, who was then only two.

I had parked outside and let us both in when suddenly a man appeared. He was just a silhouette, because of the sunlight behind him, but I could see he was pointing a gun. He was saying, “Back up against the wall and gimme the keys.” So, obviously, I waited until he was near enough, and then, using a signature kung fu move taught to me by the masters in Beijing in 1972 . . .

Oh, all right. I handed him the keys immediately, and my wallet, saying, in as light a tone of voice as I could muster while thinking of the safety of my precious two-year-old daughter, “Here you go, mate, no problem.” And he grabbed the stuff out of my hand and ran back out the door.

Huge relief descended — although it suddenly occurred to me that it was terribly silent outside. No sound of a stolen Porsche driving off. A minute later our friend with the gun returned.

“I can’t start it,” he said.

Well, fair play: some of those Porsches are tricky if you don’t know how. It’s not just a key-in-the-ignition job. You have to depress the clutch and press the start button. So out I went at gunpoint to help this man start my Porsche so he could steal it. This little part of the drama was witnessed by someone in a hairdresser’s opposite, who called the police. They picked the guy up about eight hours later and found my Porsche about three months after that, stripped of absolutely everything.

The Porsche was a mild aberration, though. Mostly I’ve stuck with Italian cars, for the beauty of them. In 2002 I bought an Enzo Ferrari to use in England. I have always enjoyed the driving experience more in England than in America. I especially love driving around London, where, incidentally, I can find almost any place you care to name, as long as I start in St John’s Wood.

But I had to get rid of the Enzo. Drawing attention to yourself is one thing, but that car was ridiculous. Only 400 of them were made, and every time you came back to it there would be a crowd gathered round it and you were forever having to clear frenzied car lovers out of the way just to get back into the driving seat.

I am very much a calmer kind of driver these days. As you get older, you don’t feel as precise with your driving as you once were. These days, if it’s a tight spot, I have no qualms at all about getting out and leaving Penny [my wife] to park it. She’s much better at that than I am. All together I don’t drive as much as I used to, nor as fast. It dawned on me eventually: I’ve got a lot to lose.      

Too May Bikes

Cities rushing to embrace the bicycle should take note of the plight of Amsterdam, which is being swamped by a two-wheel tide that may push commuters back to their cars.

“The bike is threatened by its success,” Jeanine Van Pinxteren, the leader of the central Amsterdam council, said this week, amid alarm over anarchic parking and the saturation of the city’s 200,000 street cycle bays. Nearly half a million cyclists cruise the streets daily in the city of barely one million people, marking a 44 per cent rise in pedal transport over the past 20 years. Car use has declined by a third.

More than 250 miles of dedicated paths have failed to keep up with a cycle explosion that is making life unpleasant for pedestrians forced to weave among fast-moving walls of cyclists, the council has acknowledged. But the biggest source of stress is a lack of parking space that leads to cycle rage among commuters who sometimes spend 20 minutes competing for any open grille, railing, bridge or lamp-post.

“You can only enforce the rules if there are enough parking spaces and there are just not enough now,” Ms Van Pinxteren told reporters.

Eric Wiebes, the head of Amsterdam’s transport authority, said that lack of spaces close to where cyclists wanted to be was starting to “build barriers to accessibility”.

Dutch cyclists still believed that instant parking was a right, he said. “If I told Amsterdamers they would have to walk, they would probably need the rest of the day to cool off.” Plans to create 9,000 new parking spaces at the Centraal rail station will cost €120 million (£100 million). Amsterdam authorities are struggling to foster civility in a culture in which the cycle is king. “You have to be on the lookout all the time. It’s just stress,” said Laurent Chambon, a French sociologist who has lived in Amsterdam for 15 years. “Damrak, one of the city’s main streets, is known as Kamikaze Road.”

Robert Olykan, the owner of a cycle shop, said: “It’s not really dangerous to ride a bike in Amsterdam and accidents are quite rare — if you don’t do like the locals, who ride their bikes listening to music or without any lights at night. It is weird, but Dutch law allows cyclists to wear earphones and use mobile phones riding in traffic.”

The bane of cyclists and pedestrians is a fashion for motor scooters, which are allowed in bicycle lanes.

Self-Drive Cars

I’m in an ordinary 5-series BMW in the fast lane of the autobahn, ploughing through rush-hour traffic on the outskirts of Munich. The drivers I’m overtaking don’t give the car a second glance, but there’s something earth-shaking about this understated vehicle.

It has no driver.

For the first time on a European public road, a driverless car under its own control is mixing it with unsuspecting traffic. There may be someone in the driver’s seat, but he’s essentially a passenger — the car steers itself, chooses its moments to accelerate and decelerate, switches lanes to overtake other vehicles and makes all its own decisions, independently and untouched by human hand.

This, according to BMW, is the way of the future. Twenty years from now — maybe even 10 — we’ll all be “driving” like this. The company has been given dispensation by the German government to ignore international laws that restrict self-steering vehicles to a maximum of 10kph (6mph) on public roads to research and develop the concept, and BMW is pouring phenomenal sums into bringing the driverless car to market.

This car, and two more like it, have been plying the byways of Bavaria on proving runs, and The Sunday Times was invited along to experience the ride. To comply with the government’s dispensation there must be a test driver at the wheel, ready to intervene if the car has a brainstorm, but they say they’ve not yet had to take over.

Once they push the + button on the steering wheel to engage the automatics, they just sit back and enjoy the view.


The car’s guidance system is entirely self-contained — it needs no roadside transmitters or under-the-tarmac wires and can go anywhere. It has a dozen sensors of four different types placed around the bodywork, giving its central computer system information on the layout of the road and the state of all traffic within 250 metres. A stereo camera at the top of the windscreen is connected to image-processing software that recognises white lines, road signs and other useful information while filtering out the vast amount of extraneous visual data a moving car picks up. Below the front grille are two different radars — one a conventional radio transceiver, the other a Lidar system using light in place of radio to gauge distance.

The Lidar puts out a spray of laser beams on eight different wavelengths and at four different elevations to build up a 3D image of what’s ahead of the car for up to 150 metres, depending on visibility. The radar works for up to 250 metres and switches constantly between long and short range to improve data collection. All around the car are ultrasound transmitters similar to those used in parking assist systems, but strong enough to pick up echoes from 50 metres away. The car has a GPS system — more accurate than your average sat nav because it corrects for atmospheric effects.

Accelerometers and decelerometers back up the GPS, creating an “inertial navigation system” that cross-checks its information with the car’s digital map database, made by BMW, to work out exactly where it is. It’s not as simple as that, of course — the image software must be painstakingly “taught” to recognise the good data and reject the bad, and, like most of us, the car doesn’t deal very well with people who cut in at junctions.

But when it has spent a millisecond weighing all the data, the computer system feeds power to servos in the steering, brakes and accelerator, and off we jolly well go.

Riding in the car feels perfectly safe: it will not tailgate, it speeds up and slows down gently, and switches lanes with all due consideration. It is a long way from the finished article, of course — BMW was happy to demonstrate its capabilities in the cruise on the autobahn, where the road is relatively straight and the radar returns big and chunky, but as a demonstration of the way things are going, the question remains: is it really safe enough?

Werner Huber, who is responsible for BMW’s research into “driver assistance and perception”, says it doesn’t have much to beat. “More than 90% of accidents involve driver error,” he says. “We can be much safer than that. Highly automated driving systems never get tired, they don’t get bored, their concentration does not lapse.

“Machines are better at gauging distance and speed, providing power and precision, repeating specific processes and doing good route planning. Humans are better at flexibility and improvisation, switching strategy quickly, spatial awareness, thinking ahead even in logically complex situations, and making complex and ethical decisions. Our development is addressing these areas. The main obstacle we see is political preparedness to rewrite the rules, but that, too, will change.”

For BMW, the need for increased automation is especially clear, because the company has invested more than £100m to create in-car digital systems that rival the view outside for the driver’s attention. With its current generation of information and entertainment systems, BMW has gone about as far as it can under the terms of the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Traffic, which discourages anything that distracts the driver for more than about two seconds. Yet, it says, drivers want more, and they’re going to get it.

BMW’s ConnectedDrive concepts are introducing a bewildering array of internet connectivity and driver interaction with the outside world far beyond the confines of the car, and it’s all controlled from the driver’s seat. The car, equipped with its own Sim card, has become a laptop, a smartphone and an entertainment system — the driver can download apps, choose music through online providers, get the weather or the news and have the car’s synthetic voice read it aloud, send texts and emails using accurate voice-recognition software, surf Facebook, check Twitter, and summon emergency help or report accidents with a tweak of the “app switcher” control.

Subscribing to BMW’s concierge service means that at the push of a button you contact a real human being who can give you GPS guidance to the nearest hotel, garage, restaurant, anything you want.

In some countries, including Britain, it is illegal to use some of these features — a driver cannot input navigation data into a GPS without first stopping, for instance — but elsewhere, it is left to the driver’s discretion. They especially love this stuff in China, a vital market for BMW, where driving for pleasure appears to be less embedded in the culture and owners want everything to be automatic; the concierge system in China gets 35,000 calls a week.

In the words of the company, you can “adapt your BMW seamlessly to your digital lifestyle”, and to top it all, the whole geekmobile also moves from A to B. Even BMW recognises, though, that ConnectedDrive and its Highly Automated Driving mode are merely two legs of a three-legged stool — the third is public acceptance.

As we bombed down the A9 towards Munich airport, I was left to gaze out of the window and reflect on what is lost when we relinquish control to the machine. The car performed flawlessly; as we passed a speed restriction sign it slowed to precisely 80kph, precisely in the centre of the slow lane, with a lorry up the rear. After the 100 sign, it speeded up, smoothly and precisely, to a Teutonically obedient 100kph.

Even with access to Twitter, it soon becomes a bit tedious. Perhaps the ultimate automation concept will have the “driver” playing a road-racing video game on his dashboard while the car moves smoothly, safely and efficiently to its destination. All fun will be virtual, and HAL will finally rule the spaceship.

Texting 

AT&T has a new film out about the stupidity, selfishness and yes, death, associated with texting while driving. It's directed by Werner Herzog and it's quite moving.

It's not going to work.

Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die or be maimed because it's physically impossible for us to deal with the cultural imperative to stay in touch on our phones--and drive at the same time.

The reason a movie isn't going to solve the problem is that it is competing against several cornerstones of our culture:

The culture of the car as a haven, a roving office, and a place where you do what you like
The culture of the Marlboro man, no speed limiters in cars, 'optional' speed limits on roads
The culture of connection and our fear of being left out
The culture of technology, and our bias to permit it first and ask questions later
If you get a marketing assignment where you're out to change even one of these deeply held beliefs, consider finding a new client. All four? There's no marketing lever long enough to do this work.

There's a technical solution, one that might work. The are two solutions I can think of actually, both cheap and fast and effective.

The first is to require the phone to automatically alert every person you're texting or emailing at the moment you use your phone while moving. As we've seen, knowingly interacting with someone who is driving is a crime in many locales, and yes, you should go to jail for it. We need to change the cultural imperative, and we can't do that with laws alone and we can't do that with movies. Technology, though, can fix what it broke.

The second solution is even simpler: when a phone is moving, don't permit it to accomplish certain tasks.

People won't die as a result.

It won't cost the companies a penny in profit.

And defenders of the status quo will scream about freedom and access and rights and how it used to be. They will worry about people on trains or passengers in carpools.

But you know what? It's better than being dead. Better than being the victim of the one out of three drivers I see who couldn't wait...

I have no illusions that we will find the will as a society to insist that a technology be used to alter our culture. But we could.      

Pedestrians  

For many, it is one of the few remaining consolations of urban life: a small lever of command against a world full of vast and inexorable forces.

You press the button at the pedestrian crossing and, a few moments later, the green man appears and you have stopped the traffic.

Now, however, even this power may have been proven to be delusory. At many crossings, for most of the day, it makes no difference to the green and red men whether or not you press the button. This is because a large, but unknown, number of crossings around the country are automated for 17 hours a day, according to the BBC.

Between 7am and midnight, thousands of junctions operate on a system known as the Split Cycle Offset Optimisation Technique, which appears to have been given its name purely to produce the acronym Scoot.

Developed by the Transport Research Laboratory in Wokingham and deployed in more than 170 towns and cities around the world, Scoot uses “vehicle detectors” to adjust the lengths of time between traffic stoppages depending on how heavily the roads are being used. In other words, during the busiest hours of the day the buttons at Scoot crossings are redundant, or, as they are known in New York, where the system has already been exposed, “placebo buttons”.

The predominant response to the revelations was disappointment. Julian Baggini, the editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine, said that it was degrading to be given an empty fantasy of choice. “We want to be treated as intelligent, autonomous agents rather than being manipulated,” he said.

The waiting times vary substantially depending on the location as well as the time of day, leading some pedestrians to judge their local authorities by the time they had spent standing around at traffic lights. The debate may now spread to other pointless buttons that fill the public with a warm but fallacious sense of control. Among the prime candidates for investigation are the buttons on many London Underground trains that purport to open the doors but in fact do nothing of the sort.

However, it is understood that in spite of their reputation for sublime indifference to being pressed, most buttons for closing lift doors do work.      

Technology In Cars  

I AM on a strip of flat tarmac at the wheel of an Infiniti Q50 hybrid saloon. Ahead of me lies a short slalom, described by cones. My mission, which I have chosen to accept, is to guide the Q50 through this course with the use of its steering wheel — but without the use of a steering column. What I do to the wheel will be transferred electronically to a high-response actuator, which in turn will tell the steering rack, causing the wheels to move. Ideally.

Aircraft do this kind of mechanism-free manoeuvring stuff all the time, so what could possibly go wrong? For the next 15 seconds, reader, I will be driving by wire.

“But if it fails?” I hear you urgently ask. “If the electrics go down and you’re left madly wrestling the wheel, to no effect, your knuckles whitening, your increasingly horrified screams filling the deluxe leather interior?”

Well, in that case a fair number of cones are going to die and I’m possibly going to leave a scuff mark or two on the Q50’s rather lovely metallic paint job. But these peripheral items will have sacrificed themselves for the future of driving, assuming this drive-by-wire business catches on, which seems likely. And all of us will be able to pride ourselves on having been there at the true dawn of digital driving.

The implications are vast. Technically, for example, the steering wheel doesn’t need to be a wheel: it could be any kind of controller capable of passing on the relevant electronic information. An Infiniti engineer told me about some research the company had done, asking children and adults to choose between a conventional steering wheel and some kind of nubby joystick as a tool with which to direct the car of their dreams. The adults went with the wheel; the children, reared on PlayStations and Wii consoles, overwhelmingly chose the joystick. You can’t reinvent the wheel, but you can, clearly, reinvent the steering wheel, and society appears to be in the process of doing so.

Beyond all this lies drive-by-wireless — the future in which even the wires go, and you pilot the car using an untethered handset from the seat of your choice; a future in which you plausibly find yourself conducting the school run from home, with the scroll button on your laptop, a headset microphone and, you hope, a stable internet connection.

Meanwhile, whisper it, but the Q50 still has a steering column. If the electrics fail, it kicks in as a backup, just as it does in aeroplanes. What’s that? They don’t have mechanical backup on aeroplanes? Blimey. Well, anyway: they do on the Infiniti Q50 and will continue to do so until the laws on road-going car manufacture change quite substantially.

If planes trust fly-by-wire, why not cars? That’s what Infiniti seems to think, anyway. In a world first, it has fitted the necessary electronics as standard on the hybrid Q50 and offers them as an option on the diesel model. It has named its system Direct Adaptive Steering — a passion-killing, conversation-ending label if ever there was one. But the fact that it didn’t go for a more racy, aeronautical allusion, such as Steer-by-Wire or Drive-by-Wire, possibly says something about the slightly hesitant place in which Infiniti sits in relation to this breakthrough — caught somewhere between wanting to celebrate the innovation and worrying about frightening off customers who may recall airline disasters and the reasonably named “Miracle on the Hudson”. Then there’s the likely resistance it faces from people who value the feedback that comes from turning a real steering column, with a real steering wheel — what we might call the hardcore analogue drivers, so many of whose pleasures are under siege.

Fintan Knight, Infiniti’s vice-president for Europe, sounded as though he was trying to appease these people when he spoke last week of the technology as “augmenting the driving experience rather than replacing the driving experience”.

Still, digital steering can’t help sounding like a replaced experience — or, worse, no experience at all, which will surely be enough to cause a mild sweat of anxiety to break out on people who are only now coming to terms with the transition from vinyl to compact disc.

This, though, is the way driving is going. Things that used to need muscle are now achieved with tiny twists of knobs and touches of keypads. Pulling at handbrake levers, forcing gears into cogs with a big stick — all now firmly heritage activities, practised solely by people in costume at country fairs.

The £40,000 hybrid Q50 has drive-by-wire as standardThe £40,000 hybrid Q50 has drive-by-wire as standard (Infinti) This has already happened in no small measure to steering. Even in the cheapest cars, your efforts at the wheel are power-assisted, your work subject to intervention and management along the line, which is why it’s possible to haul around three tons of SUV without having a torso akin to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, circa 1978. Nevertheless, the essentially mechanical nature of the exchange survives: you turn the steering wheel, and you cause the wheels to move in the direction of your turning. You know where you are with that.

The Q50’s steering is the product of at least eight years of work by crack engineers. The absence of mechanical parts is meant to produce a quicker response, without vibration. The company claims to have road-tested the system over 250,000 miles, and if that doesn’t reassure you, perhaps the triple-mode back-up (three electronic units constantly monitoring each other for aberration) will.

You choose your favoured steering response from a menu, accessed via the touchscreen on the dash. There’s Light/Casual, which sounds like a dress code; there’s Heavy/Quick, in which the wheel gains some weight in your hands but brings a sharper response; and there’s Standard, which falls somewhere in between. There is also a small amount of scope for making your own custom mix. (Analogue drivers might warm slightly to that.)

The car is heavier for the addition of its drive-by-wire system. Still, it whipped around those cones with ease. The steering wheel still naturally vibrates in your hand, contrary to Infiniti’s claim. Or is that an ersatz, simulated vibration, pumped in digitally to create the reassuring effect of wheel on road — the automotive equivalent of the PlayStation “shock” feature, whereby a controller pulses against your palm to let you know you have just, say, wiped your helicopter down the side of a tower block? (No, in fact; but a man could grow paranoid.)

It felt, frankly, like a power-assisted system — but a really high-end, smooth-as-butter power-assisted system. In its slightly eerie purity, it appears to be designed to make you forget it, rather than to impress you with the richness of its character and the warmth of its foibles. As such, it was in keeping with Infiniti’s mission to blur as far as possible the distinction between driving and lying in a spa, listening to panpipes. Inside any Infiniti, you feel as though you should be wearing a robe and a pair of slippers. Perhaps that’s the future, too.

Will Infiniti now plumb its adaptive steering into all its cars? It doesn’t know — or, at any rate, it’s not saying. It’s waiting, one assumes, to see how the idea goes down with people, whether other companies latch onto the idea, whether trust builds and the legal landscape changes.

Anyone dizzied by the prospect of these changes may be reassured by one further detail. For all the hi-tech lustre and the way it fearlessly sets sail for the island of tomorrow, the Q50 comes with an old-fashioned, pump-action, foot-operated parking brake. Phew. The world just slowed down again. And no cones were hurt in the testing of this motoring revolution.

Bumpy road to the drive-by-wire future

We all like to think we’re good drivers. But the truth is that, for some time, a fair bit of your driving has been done by computer.

When you accelerate before overtaking, your foot pushes down on the accelerator, but there is no cable reaching to the engine and opening the throttle. Instead, the pressure on the pedal sends a signal to an electronic control unit, which monitors the operating conditions and decides what instructions to send to an actuator, which opens the throttle to the appropriate extent.

This can lead to a “computer says no” situation, in which a driver finds himself with a throttle that seems to be stubbornly refusing to respond. Speed restrictors, rev limiters (designed to stop drivers over-revving and damaging the engine) and systems that in slippery conditions restrict power to stop the tyres losing grip can all curtail the response to the driver’s right foot.

As engines have become more complicated and the need to regulate their performance to reduce emissions and improve fuel economy has influenced their development, electronic throttle control has become widely used in the motor industry, and is the most common application of drive-by-wire technology.

The systems came under scrutiny in 2009-10 after Toyota issued recall notices for about 12m of its cars. This followed problems with unintended acceleration (later determined to have been caused, in some cases, by floor mats snagging the pedal).

Last month Nissan announced a recall for almost 1m cars fitted with an electronic throttle system: it said a faulty sensor meant there was the danger of an unexpected loss of acceleration.

Electronic brake control arrived in Britain in 2002 with the Sensotronic brake control (SBC) installed on Mercedes-Benz SL-class models. Instead of a mechanical system that boosted pressure applied by the driver when he pressed the brake pedal, the new setup worked like a switch, activating the SBC’s control unit, which decided how much brake fluid should be pumped to each wheel’s brake calliper.

Mercedes also used the system on its popular E-class models, but after customer complaints about software failures led to the recall of more than half a million Mercedes cars in 2004, it was phased out.

The future of drive-by-wire will greatly depend on whether consumers have confidence in the technology. Volvo claims its cars could be driving themselves as soon as next year — albeit at speeds below 31mph — using onboard cameras and radar sensors that will enable the car to maintain a safe distance from the vehicle in front and stay within its chosen lane.

However, in a disastrous public relations exercise in 2010, reporters witnessed a Volvo S60 test vehicle with a collision detection system drive into the back of a stationary lorry. Perhaps car manufacturers still need to rely on that good old safety net: the driver.      

Driverless Cars  

silver BMW 5 Series is weaving through traffic at roughly 120 kilometers per hour (75 mph) on a freeway that cuts northeast through Bavaria between Munich and Ingolstadt. I’m in the driver’s seat, watching cars and trucks pass by, but I haven’t touched the steering wheel, the brake, or the gas pedal for at least 10 minutes. The BMW approaches a truck that is moving slowly. To maintain our speed, the car activates its turn signal and begins steering to the left, toward the passing lane. Just as it does, another car swerves into the passing lane from several cars behind. The BMW quickly switches off its signal and pulls back to the center of the lane, waiting for the speeding car to pass before trying again.

Putting your life in the hands of a robot chauffeur offers an unnerving glimpse into how driving is about to be upended. The automobile, which has followed a path of steady but slow technological evolution for the past 130 years, is on course to change dramatically in the next few years, in ways that could have radical economic, environmental, and social impacts.

The first autonomous systems, which are able to control steering, braking, and accelerating, are already starting to appear in cars; these systems require drivers to keep an eye on the road and hands on the wheel. But the next generation, such as BMW’s self-driving prototype, could be available in less than a decade and free drivers to work, text, or just relax. Ford, GM, Toyota, Nissan, Volvo, and Audi have all shown off cars that can drive themselves, and they have all declared that within a decade they plan to sell some form of advanced automation—cars able to take over driving on highways or to park themselves in a garage. Google, meanwhile, is investing millions in autonomous driving software, and its driverless cars have become a familiar sight on the highways around Silicon Valley over the last several years.

The allure of automation for car companies is huge. In a fiercely competitive market, in which the makers of luxury cars race to indulge customers with the latest technology, it would be commercial suicide not to invest heavily in an automated future. “It’s the most impressive experience we can offer,” Werner Huber, the man in charge of BMW’s autonomous driving project, told me at the company’s headquarters in Munich. He said the company aims to be “one of the first in the world” to introduce highway autonomy.

Thanks to autonomous driving, the road ahead seems likely to have fewer traffic accidents and less congestion and pollution. Data published last year by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a U.S. nonprofit funded by the auto industry, suggests that partly autonomous features are already helping to reduce crashes. Its figures, collected from U.S. auto insurers, show that cars with forward collision warning systems, which either warn the driver about an impending crash or apply the brakes automatically, are involved in far fewer crashes than cars without them.

More comprehensive autonomy could reduce traffic accidents further still. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that more than 90 percent of road crashes involve human error, a figure that has led some experts to predict that autonomous driving will reduce the number of accidents on the road by a similar percentage. Assuming the technology becomes ubiquitous and does have such an effect, the benefits to society will be huge. Almost 33,000 people die on the roads in the United States each year, at a cost of $300 billion, according to the American Automobile Association. The World Health Organization estimates that worldwide over 1.2 million people die on roads every year.

Meanwhile, demonstrations conducted at the University of California, Riverside, in 1997 and experiments involving modified road vehicles conducted by Volvo and others in 2011 suggest that having vehicles travel in high-speed automated “platoons,” thereby reducing aerodynamic drag, could lower fuel consumption by 20 percent. And an engineering study published last year concluded that automation could theoretically allow nearly four times as many cars to travel on a given stretch of highway. That could save some of the 5.5 billion hours and 2.9 billion gallons of fuel that the Texas Transportation Institute says are wasted by traffic congestion each year.

If all else fails, there is a big red button on the dashboard that cuts power to all the car’s computers. I practiced hitting it a few times.

But such projections tend to overlook just how challenging it will be to make a driverless car. If autonomous driving is to change transportation dramatically, it needs to be both widespread and flawless. Turning such a complex technology into a commercial product is unlikely to be simple. It could take decades for the technology to come down in cost, and it might take even longer for it to work safely enough that we trust fully automated vehicles to drive us around.

German engineering

Much of the hype about autonomous driving has, unsurprisingly, focused on Google’s self-driving project. The cars are impressive, and the company has no doubt insinuated the possibility of driverless vehicles into the imaginations of many. But for all its expertise in developing search technology and software, Google has zero experience building cars. To understand how autonomous driving is more likely to emerge, it is more instructive to see what some of the world’s most advanced automakers are working on. And few places in the world can rival the automotive expertise of Germany, where BMW, Audi, Mercedes-­Benz, and Volkswagen are all busy trying to change autonomous driving from a research effort into a viable option on their newest models.

Shortly after arriving in Munich, I found myself at a test track north of the city getting safety instruction from Michael Aeberhard, a BMW research engineer. As I drove a prototype BMW 5 Series along an empty stretch of track, Aeberhard told me to take my hands off the wheel and then issued commands that made the car go berserk and steer wildly off course. Each time, I had to grab the wheel as quickly as I could to override the behavior. The system is designed to defer to a human driver, giving up control whenever he or she moves the wheel or presses a pedal. And if all else fails, there is a big red button on the dashboard that cuts power to all the car’s computers. I practiced hitting it a few times, and discovered how hard it was to control the car without even the power-assisted steering. The idea of the exercise was to prepare me for potential glitches during the actual test drive. “It’s still a prototype,” Aeberhard reminded me several times.

After I signed a disclaimer, we drove to the autobahn outside Munich. A screen fixed to the passenger side of the dashboard showed the world as the car perceives it: three lanes, on which a tiny animated version of the car is surrounded by a bunch of floating blue blocks, each corresponding to a nearby vehicle or to an obstacle like one of the barriers on either side of the road. Aeberhard told me to activate the system in heavy traffic as we rode at about 100 kilometers per hour. When I first flicked the switch, I was dubious about even removing my hands from the wheel, but after watching the car perform numerous passing maneuvers, I found myself relaxing—to my astonishment—until I had to actually remind myself to pay attention to the road.

The car looked normal from the outside. There’s no place on a sleek luxury sedan for the huge rotating laser scanners seen on the prototypes being tested by Google. So BMW and other carmakers have had to find ways to pack smaller, more limited sensors into the body of a car without compromising weight or styling.

Concealed inside the BMW’s front and rear bumpers, two laser scanners and three radar sensors sweep the road before and behind for anything within about 200 meters. Embedded at the top of the windshield and rear window are cameras that track the road markings and detect road signs. Near each side mirror are wide-angle laser scanners, each with almost 180 degrees of vision, that watch the road left and right. Four ultrasonic sensors above the wheels monitor the area close to the car. Finally, a differential Global Positioning System receiver, which combines signals from ground-based stations with those from satellites, knows where the car is, to within a few centimeters of the closest lane marking.

Several computers inside the car’s trunk perform split-second measurements and calculations, processing data pouring in from the sensors. Software assigns a value to each lane of the road based on the car’s speed and the behavior of nearby vehicles. Using a probabilistic technique that helps cancel out inaccuracies in sensor readings, this software decides whether to switch to another lane, to attempt to pass the car ahead, or to get out of the way of a vehicle approaching from behind. Commands are relayed to a separate computer that controls acceleration, braking, and steering. Yet another computer system monitors the behavior of everything involved with autonomous driving for signs of malfunction.

Impressive though BMW’s autonomous highway driving is, it is still years away from market. To see the most advanced autonomy now available, a day later I took the train from Munich to Stuttgart to visit another German automotive giant, Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz. At the company’s research and development facility southeast of the city, where experimental new models cruise around covered in black material to hide new designs and features from photographers, I got to ride in probably the most autonomous road car on the market today: the 2014 ­Mercedes S-Class.

A jovial safety engineer drove me around a test track, showing how the car can lock onto a vehicle in front and follow it along the road at a safe distance. To follow at a constant distance, the car’s computers take over not only braking and accelerating, as with conventional adaptive cruise control, but steering too.

Using a stereo camera, radar, and an infrared camera, the S-Class can also spot objects on the road ahead and take control of the brakes to prevent an accident. The engineer eagerly demonstrated this by accelerating toward a dummy placed in the center of the track. At about 80 kilometers per hour, he took his hands off the wheel and removed his foot from the accelerator. Just when impact seemed all but inevitable, the car performed a near-perfect emergency stop, wrenching us forward in our seats but bringing itself to rest about a foot in front of the dummy, which bore an appropriately terrified expression.

Uncertain road

With such technology already on the road and prototypes like BMW’s in the works, it’s tempting to imagine that total automation can’t be far away. In reality, making the leap from the kind of autonomy in the Mercedes-Benz S-Class to the kind in BMW’s prototype will take time, and the dream of total automation could prove surprisingly elusive.

For one thing, many of the sensors and computers found in BMW’s car, and in other prototypes, are too expensive to be deployed widely. And achieving even more complete automation will probably mean using more advanced, more expensive sensors and computers. The spinning laser instrument, or LIDAR, seen on the roof of Google’s cars, for instance, provides the best 3-D image of the surrounding world, accurate down to two centimeters, but sells for around $80,000. Such instruments will also need to be miniaturized and redesigned, adding more cost, since few car designers would slap the existing ones on top of a sleek new model.

Cost will be just one factor, though. While several U.S. states have passed laws permitting autonomous cars to be tested on their roads, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has yet to devise regulations for testing and certifying the safety and reliability of autonomous features. Two major international treaties, the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic and the Geneva Convention on Road Traffic, may need to be changed for the cars to be used in Europe and the United States, as both documents state that a driver must be in full control of a vehicle at all times.

Most daunting, however, are the remaining computer science and artificial-­intelligence challenges. Automated driving will at first be limited to relatively simple situations, mainly highway driving, because the technology still can’t respond to uncertainties posed by oncoming traffic, rotaries, and pedestrians. And drivers will also almost certainly be expected to assume some sort of supervisory role, requiring them to be ready to retake control as soon as the system gets outside its comfort zone.

The relationship between human and robot driver could be surprisingly fraught. The problem, as I discovered during my BMW test drive, is that it’s all too easy to lose focus, and difficult to get it back. The difficulty of reëngaging distracted drivers is an issue that Bryan Reimer, a research scientist in MIT’s Age Lab, has well documented (see “Proceed with Caution toward the Self-Driving Car,” May/June 2013). Perhaps the “most inhibiting factors” in the development of driverless cars, he suggests, “will be factors related to the human experience.”

In an effort to address this issue, carmakers are thinking about ways to prevent drivers from becoming too distracted, and ways to bring them back to the driving task as smoothly as possible. This may mean monitoring drivers’ attention and alerting them if they’re becoming too disengaged. “The first generations [of autonomous cars] are going to require a driver to intervene at certain points,” Clifford Nass, codirector of Stanford University’s Center for Automotive Research, told me. “It turns out that may be the most dangerous moment for autonomous vehicles. We may have this terrible irony that when the car is driving autonomously it is much safer, but because of the inability of humans to get back in the loop it may ultimately be less safe.”

An important challenge with a system that drives all by itself, but only some of the time, is that it must be able to predict when it may be about to fail, to give the driver enough time to take over. This ability is limited by the range of a car’s sensors and by the inherent difficulty of predicting the outcome of a complex situation. “Maybe the driver is completely distracted,” Werner Huber said. “He takes five, six, seven seconds to come back to the driving task—that means the car has to know [in advance] when its limitation is reached. The challenge is very big.”

Before traveling to Germany, I visited John ­Leonard, an MIT professor who works on robot navigation, to find out more about the limits of vehicle automation. ­Leonard led one of the teams involved in the DARPA Urban Challenge, an event in 2007 that saw autonomous vehicles race across mocked-up city streets, complete with stop-sign intersections and moving traffic. The challenge inspired new research and new interest in autonomous driving, but ­Leonard is restrained in his enthusiasm for the commercial trajectory that autonomous driving has taken since then. “Some of these fundamental questions, about representing the world and being able to predict what might happen—we might still be decades behind humans with our machine technology,” he told me. “There are major, unsolved, difficult issues here. We have to be careful that we don’t overhype how well it works.”

Leonard suggested that much of the technology that has helped autonomous cars deal with complex urban environments in research projects—some of which is used in Google’s cars today—may never be cheap or compact enough to be employed in commercially available vehicles. This includes not just the LIDAR but also an inertial navigation system, which provides precise positioning information by monitoring the vehicle’s own movement and combining the resulting data with differential GPS and a highly accurate digital map. What’s more, poor weather can significantly degrade the reliability of sensors, ­Leonard said, and it may not always be feasible to rely heavily on a digital map, as so many prototype systems do. “If the system relies on a very accurate prior map, then it has to be robust to the situation of that map being wrong, and the work of keeping those maps up to date shouldn’t be underestimated,” ­he said.

Near the end of my ride in BMW’s autonomous prototype, I discovered an example of imperfect autonomy in action. We had made a loop of the airport and were heading back toward the city when a Smart car, which had been darting through traffic a little erratically, suddenly swung in front of me from the right. Confused by its sudden and irregular maneuver, our car kept approaching it rapidly, and with less than a second to spare I lost my nerve and hit the brakes, slowing the car down and taking it out of self-driving mode. A moment later I asked Aeberhard if our car would have braked in time. “It would’ve been close,” he admitted.

Despite the flashy demos and the bold plans for commercialization, I sometimes detected among carmakers a desire to hit the brakes and temper expectations. Ralf Herttwich, who leads research and engineering of driver assistance systems at Mercedes, explained that interpreting a situation becomes exponentially more difficult as the road becomes more complex. “Once you leave the highway and once you go onto the average road, environment perception needs to get better. Your interpretation of traffic situations, because there are so many more of them—they need to get better,” he said. “Just looking at a traffic light and deciding if that traffic light is for you is a very, very complex problem.”

MIT’s Leonard, for one, does not believe total autonomy is imminent. “I do not expect there to be taxis in Manhattan with no drivers in my lifetime,” he said, before quickly adding, “And I don’t want to see taxi drivers out of business. They know where they’re going, and—at least in Europe—they’re courteous and safe, and they get you where you need to be. That’s a very valuable societal role.”      

Cycling and Risks 

MY RATHER strange job as a statistician and Winton professor of the public understanding of risk at Cambridge University means I give a lot of talks about — you guessed it — risk, and inevitably I get round to hot topics such as fracking, climate change, badgers, GM foods and Fukushima.

But if I want to get an audience excited, I just mention cycle safety, and specifically the question of whether the benefits of cycling outweigh the risks, and whether helmets should be encouraged.

From a fitness perspective, there is no doubt that getting people cycling is an extraordinarily good investment. The recent National Travel Survey reported that cyclists did an average of 20 minutes a day of moderate exercise, which is almost exactly the government recommended minimum level.

If this 20 minutes is almost all the exercise you do, then there is a huge benefit, taking a few years off your effective age or putting an hour on your life for each 20 minutes of activity. If you are already active, it does less for you. For the average Briton, then, I judge that 20 minutes of cycling will add 20 minutes to your life — it’s as if you stop getting older when you climb on a bike.

But there is another side to the risk equation: cycling can be dangerous. Our average cyclist will have about a one in 8m chance of getting killed in that 20 minutes. Does that mean that it is a net life extender, or a lifespan reducer? At the level of the individual, the answer depends on who is doing the cycling and the context. People on heavy bikes in strange cities are likely to be extra-careful, which is probably why there has been only one fatality on London’s Boris bikes in about 9m hours of cycling when, statistically, we would have expected three or four. The bikes tend to be ridden by visitors or irregular users who often wear office attire and proceed more gently than head-down regular cyclists. But what about the risks for the average cyclist?

People have done the sums and I’m happy to report that, taking everything into account, the public health benefits of cycling outweigh the risks about tenfold. From this perspective anything that encourages cycling is a good thing. Just look at the approach of the Dutch and the Danes: mass cycling, good infrastructure, low risk.

Which brings us back to whether a cycle helmet is a good or bad thing. Wearing one will protect your head in an accident but could encourage you to ride more recklessly. A driver might give a helmetless cyclist a wider berth because they look vulnerable. The issues are complicated, the results unclear. In the countries just mentioned there is rarely one to be seen, and a recent Canadian study found negligible differences in the reduction in injury rates in provinces with mandatory helmet laws compared with those without. The academic evidence around policies encouraging helmets is still deeply contested.

As for your individual decision, an important risk factor is the way you cycle. Ask yourself: are you a pootler (taking your time, looking around, being cautious) or a racer (trying to do each journey in the shortest possible time)? This changes your risk and quite reasonably can change your decision about wearing a helmet. I for one am proud to pootle.

(David Spiegelhalter is co-author of The Norm Chronicles)      

Racing Ferraris For The Rich  

SO YOU have made your money and you want to treat yourself. You already have a yacht in Monaco and a penthouse in Mayfair, and what you would really like is a new car. The problem is, you own a Bentley and a Rolls-Royce and your friends all have Italian supercars, but you want something different.

So you call your local Ferrari dealer and ask what it would suggest. The answer is simple: you should join Corse Clienti.

The Italian supercar maker’s private members club offers millionaire car fans the opportunity to buy a Ferrari that is so rare it’s virtually unique, and provides you with the opportunity to drive it at no-expense-spared meetings. It is regarded as one of the most exclusive clubs in the world, where men old enough to know better indulge their schoolboy fantasies in a heady mix of petrol fumes and speed.

To become a member you first need to buy a Ferrari. But not just any: it has to be a racing Ferrari. You can choose an ex-Formula One machine costing up to £3m or opt for a slightly cheaper “special edition” Ferrari racer such as the FXX (an experimental racing version of the Enzo) or the 599XX, a track-only version of the road-legal 599 supercar. A special edition cost up to £1.2m when new, and about 30 examples of each were made.



But that initial cost is just the start: none of the cars is street-legal, so in order to drive one you need to be on a racetrack. It’s here that Corse Clienti comes into its own as it will — for a fee — transport your car to any track in the world, provide all the technical support you need and repair any damage. Then, at the end of the day it will pack it up and transport it back to the factory at Maranello, where it will be looked after in climate-controlled luxury until you want to drive it again.

Naturally, none of this comes cheap: club members pay an average of £50,000 every time they drive their car, while for some former F1 machines the cost can be double that sum.

So what is it like to be a member of what Ferrari calls “the best club in the world”? And what goes on at those race meetings?

The first thing you notice is the car park; rather than the usual collection of Fords, Peugeots and BMWs you find at track days, this car park is filled with Ferraris — more than 1,000 of them arranged in rows, including a 1980s Testarossa, an Enzo and a rare 599 GTO. But they don’t belong to the Corse Clienti members — they are just Ferraris whose owners have been invited along to watch the club members in action.



Club members such as Michael Luzich, a private equity manager from New York who owns a 599XX and is here to race it in a gentlemanly fashion before jetting back to America. “It’s the best way to own a car,” he says. “I can’t maintain it, so it’s comforting for me to know that Ferrari take it back to a facility and make sure it is safe. It’s such a direct and visceral experience on track but it’s also wonderfully relaxing because you are focusing entirely on driving.”

As for the eye-watering cost of membership, he says he deserves to treat himself: “I work really hard to afford this, from Monday to Sunday, and I work at these weekends, too. When I get out of the car, I’ll switch on my laptop to check the markets.”

Ferrari boss Luca di Montezemolo and car owner Peter MannFerrari boss Luca di Montezemolo and car owner Peter Mann The sums of money involved are staggering, especially since servicing, repairs, tyres and fuel are charged on top of the £50,000 but, according to Ferrari, the owners think it’s worth every penny. “It’s like renting a car,” says Enrico Galliera, Ferrari’s commercial and marketing senior vice-president. “Over 20 years ago, some Ferrari customers started to bring their road cars onto the track. They began pushing us, saying they wanted a car for the track. Some drivers didn’t want to race but to simply drive for pleasure.”

Ferrari began selling F1 cars in 2003 (although the machines must be at least two years old to protect technical secrets) and three years later developed the FXX, followed by the 599XX in 2010. “The XX cars became a laboratory,” says Galliera. “We put a lot of exciting technology in the car and now the clients have become pivotal to developing the technology, part of the development programme.”

The idea of combining the glamour of racing with cutting-edge cars in order to appeal to super-rich clients is not limited to Ferrari. A racing version of Lamborghini’s Gallardo can be had to compete in the company’s Super Trofeo, which although technically a racing series is as much about hospitality as horsepower. After returning to the pits, the competitors can relax in a luxury hospitality area that offers food cooked by top chefs. And Porsche runs its Carrera Cup for owners of its 911 racing car.

“It’s not a huge market but it’s very clear that there is an appetite for this,” says Sebastian Dovey, managing partner at the Scorpio Partnership, a marketing company that specialises in targeting multimillionaires. “Some of these people may have more money than sense. But most have made their own wealth and they will see the cars as an investment too.”

Dovey says programmes such as Corse Clienti help to lock valuable customers into a brand, making it more likely that they will continue to spend their money with Ferrari. “Customers are not just buying a car, there’s a whole package that comes with it in terms of the experience,” he says.

Next year the Ferrari party will come to Northamptonshire. On September 12-14, Silverstone will host the Corse Clienti and spectators will be able to see the rare cars on the track. But for some people the real show is in the paddock, where passes are issued to club members, as well as Ferrari owners who have been invited by a local dealer.

At Hockenheim, it’s as if the Côte d’Azur has moved to Germany for the weekend. Ferrari owners sip champagne in the hospitality area to a soundtrack of screaming V12 engines while comparing their Hublot watches and 15-speaker JBL sound systems. Waitresses totter around in high heels trying to ignore the stares of the middle-aged men around the tables. It is easy to spot the owners of the former F1 cars, as they are issued with personalised white racing suits emblazoned with the words “F1 Clienti”.

And if you have ever wondered what retired F1 drivers do, here’s the answer. Marc Gené, a former Minardi F1 driver, travels to each event, meeting each driver and checking their telemetry, offering tips on how to improve and which of the three compounds of tyre on offer is best.

The biggest problem is squeezing some of the well-lunched businessmen into the cars. “Sometimes a driver won’t fit,” says Gené. “Luckily the new cars are bigger than the old cars.”

Peter Mann, 57, from Lausanne, Switzerland, owns one of Kimi Raikkonen’s 2008 cars.

“For me it is the ultimate dream,” he says. “It’s a dream I have had for 57 years. I like to look at the events as two or three days of intensive therapy — I get away and immerse myself in the experience.”

There are probably cheaper forms of therapy, but there are few better ways to enjoy your wealth than by owning a race-bred Ferrari — even if you don’t get to keep it in your garage.

The X-Men

Ferrari’s “X” cars are among the rarest machines you can buy. Only 30 each of the 599XXs and FXXs have been built, and while they cost £1m and £1.2m respectively when new, as second-hand cars they can command twice as much.

But owning one of these is not the same as owning other supercars. Because they aren’t road-legal and require expert maintenance, most of the cars are kept at its headquarters in Italy. There they are serviced and kept in top condition by Ferrari engineers, and the pampering is estimated to cost tens of thousands of pounds a year.

To drive the cars, owners must stump up a further £50,000 per event to have them transported to the tracks around the world at which Ferrari holds race weekends. If an owner wants to drive his car outside these events, Ferrari will fly engineers to the chosen location — for a fee.      

Wheel Clamps 

It's 25 ponds of cold-rolled, 11-gauge steel and it has a grip like a pit bull. It has inspired terror--the kind that makes people pay big money for relief from its clutches in every city it has invaded.

Citizens of Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, New York, New Orleans and countless other cities have fallen prey to its legendary ability to create extreme anxiety.

When we learned of the impending arrival of the fearsome boot, we decided to find out for ourselves just how effective this ugly device would be. We bought a boot, for $400, from the Palma Auto-Boot Company in Arlington, Virginia. We clamped it on a car and showed it to a few mechanically inclined individuals who have a passion for fighting creeping fascism wherever it rears its head (or boot).

And guess what we found? The boot, the big, ugly scary auto-immobilizer, is really just a marshmallow.

It took our bootbusters no time at all to figure out how to dismantle and remove the boot, quickly and quietly, with nothing more than a few common tools that can be bought for less than $30 in any decent hardware store.

Of course, busting a boot is illegal (unless you bought it yourself). And since the police will keep records of which cars got the boot, anyone attempting what the Palma Auto-Boot Company calls "unauthorized removal" could face an additional fine (for destruction of public property) and possibly criminal prosecution.

But unless the police catch the bootbuster in the act, they can't actually prove he or she did the dirty deed. In fact, we've already heard reports that a few anarchist malcontents who oppose the imposition of the boot are going to begin removing the things at random, leaving ordinary boot victims free to plead honest ignorance of the entire situation.

According to a story in the July 1984 Washington Weekly, police in the District of Columbia insist that the boots are rarely busted, and can be removed only with the proper keys or with "heavy equipment." But our sources in Washington tell us they have taken off dozens of boots over the years, often by simply letting the air of the booted tire, and they have never faced prosecution.

The Boot was originally a French invention. It was first employed in this country in Denver, in 1953. At that time, it was known as the "French Boot;" now, it's commonly called the "Denver Boot."

But in recent years, use of the boot has spread to cities in all corners of the country. Today, virtually every major city uses the device.

Several manufacturers make versions of the boot, but all are very similar. The standard device comes in two parts: a clamp that is set on both the inside and the outside of the wheel rim and tightened with a bolt, and an arm that is placed over the clamp, covering the bolt and extending about 18 inches to cover the hubcap and prevent the car owner from gaining access to the lug nuts and removing the wheel. The arm is locked onto the clamp with a heavy-duty padlock, which is protected by a quarter-inch thick steel box .

A notice is then attached to the car, warning the driver not to move the vehicle unless he or she wants to risk severe damage.

Denver Parking Authority boss Ken Jaeger told the Bay Guardian that his city has some 150 boots, and immobilizes 7,000 cars a year. In Denver, a city of 500,000 people, a car is eligible for the boot if it is found to have three or more unpaid parking tickets more than 30 days old.

He said the city boots between 15 and 20 cars a day, with a five-person boot crew. It costs $50 to have a boot removed in Denver.

San Francisco's boot program is scheduled to begin operation sometime in October, according to Rina Cutler, who will be administering the new plan. "Right now we are in the draft stage," she told the Bay Guardian. "By May 1st we plan to begin getting the word out to the public." But if Cutler's experience in Boston is any indication, the boot will be here to stay. Simply put, the boot is a source of revenue. "In 1989, Boston booted 9,500 cars, which brought in some $190,000," Cutler said. News reports from cities like Chicago describe parking-ticket payoff revenue at $140,000 a day, a four-fold increase over pre-boot days. In Washington, D.C., parking-ticket revenues were outrunning the cost of boot crews by a ten-to-one ratio in 1984.

Cutler said the boot's most dramatic strength is its ability to inspire traffic scofflaws to come forward and pay off their tickets.

Attached to the non-curb side of a car, painted bright yellow or orange, a boot is pretty hard to miss. "We found that after we booted a car in a neighborhood, people from that neighborhood would come in and pay off tickets," she said. "They see the boot and come in an pay."

HOW WE BEAT THE BOOT

Parking boots are public property. The parking-control officers who attach them to your wheels intend for them to stay there until you've paid off your fines. Removing the boot without authorization, or damaging it in any way, is a crime.

Nevertheless, in cities like Denver and Boston, where the boot has been a part of life for years, the contraptions occasionally disappear. In some cities, more than 10 percent of the boot stock has vanished or been rendered inoperable (see main story).

That came as no surprise to the mechanical experts who examined our boot. The boot, they say, is nowhere near as tough as it looks. Anyone with less than $30 worth of basic hand tools and enough dexterity to screw in a light bulb can probably break the boot's grip on a car wheel in about ten minutes.

The boot is designed to intimidate, our experts say; its toughest parts are the ones that would be the most obvious targets for boot-busting vandals-- the lock mechanism, for example. With a special tamper-resistant padlock surrounded by a box made of quarter inch carbon steel plates, the lock will stand up to just about anything short of a low-yield nuclear device. So our bootbusters ignored the lock and looked for other, less-obvious places where the boot could be attacked. It took them no time to discover several major weak points in the boot's protective armor.

Deflating the tire. If the boot is going to work properly, it must be properly installed, and that's not an easy process--especially in the dark, when you have a long night of boot-installing ahead. if the installation is even a bit sloppy (that is, if the jaws that attach the boot to the wheel are a little bit loose), it's often possible to remove the boot by letting the air out of the tire and simply sliding the whole thing off.

This is by far the simplest strategy. It doesn't always work-- conscientious installers can prevent it almost every time, and some car wheels don't leave enough room for the process anyway. But veterans of boot-happy cities have told us they've removed dozens of boots this way, quickly, quietly and easily.

The hubcap plate. A key element to the boot's effectiveness is its ability to prevent car-owners from getting access to the lug nuts on the booted wheel. One the lug nuts are accessible, the wheel can be removed and replaced with a spare tire, and the car can be driven away.

If the boot is properly installed, the plate will be tightly secured over the hubcaps, making it impossible even to imagine loosening the lug nuts. But the plate is one of the more flimsy parts of the boot; it's attached by a half -inch swivel pin that is spot-welded to the frame. As our boot-busting experts explained, spot welds that hold together two pieces of metal of different thicknesses are inherently weak. There are several such welds on the boot, and this one is especially vulnerable.

With a common battery-powered drill and a 15-cent grinding wheel or "cut-off tool" (see photos), one of our experts was able to grind away most of the weld on the pin in about two minutes. With a five-dollar cold chisel and a standard hammer, he did the same job even faster.

Once the weld is broken, a quick blow with a hammer forced the pin out, releasing the plate from the boot frame and making it easy to change the tire and rive away, leaving the old, boot-laden tire behind (or safely stowed in the trunk as a souvenir).

The jaw-to-frame pins. The main frame of the boot--the "arm"--fits into a pair of metal pins on the wheel-clamp, or "jaw". The pins are a central element of the boot's structure. They're also one of its weakest links.

The pins are only about an inch long. When the boot is installed, they appear to be connected to each other through some sort of thick, central rod. In fact, they're just stuck into holes drilled in the frame, and spot-welded at the bottom.

Even when the boot is assembled, there's plenty of free play between the arm and the pins. A few strong, sharp blows with a hammer on the top of the pins quickly breaks them free and makes them easy to remove. With those pins gone, the boot comes apart immediately.

The welds holding the lock-box to the frame. For all the effort that the boot-makers put into developing an impregnable locking mechanism, it's amazing how loosely the lock-box is attached to the rest of the boot. Four flimsy spot-welds hold the entire padlock-and-coverplate assembly to the main boot frame. It took and expert just a few seconds to chip away one of the welds with a chisel and hammer; when one of our spastic, incompetent, weak-wristed editors tried it on a second weld a few days later, it took less than a minute.

Once the lock-box is liberated from the frame, the entire boot can be dismantled and removed quickly with a ratchet and standard (16-inch) spark-plug socket.

The arm itself. If all else fails, our experts discovered they could actually cut through the tough-looking steel of the main arm with a battery-powered drill and a cut-off tool. Forget the oxyacetylene torches and the nitric acid--the boot arm cuts like butter with a cheap hobbyist's tool. By our calculations, a standard drill-and-cut-off tool set-up can cut through the main arm in less than ten minutes.

The padlock keys. When the parking-control officers come to remove a boot, the first thing they have to do is unlock the padlock. Since the city is buying about 100 of the monsters, it seems highly unlikely that every boot will have a different key. In other cities, like Denver, a single master key unlocks them all.

That means, of course, than an anarchist thug with a penchant for troublemaking (or a wily hustler with an eye for a quick profit) could easily dismantle and remove the boot from some poor innocent scofflaw's illegally parked car, take the thing home, bust the lock off and pay a less-than scrupulous locksmith to make up a new key--a key that would instantly unlock every boot in the city.

Of course, the city can always change all the padlocks on a regular basis (although they don't come cheap). But if we know this city, the pirates will soon be making and selling the keys faster than the cops can replace the locks, forcing the taxpayers to pour ever-increasing sums of money into a parking law- enforcement mechanism that is neither appropriate nor effective for San Francisco.      

Dashcams 

RECKLESS drivers beware. Police forces are to encourage the public to send them video footage, recorded on “dashcam” cameras of motorists breaking the law, for potential prosecutions.

Tens of thousands of cars have dashboard-mounted cameras, costing as little as £70 and typically installed defensively to protect against false claims or to cut insurance premiums. Now the police plan to exploit their potential for catching traffic offenders, urging drivers to send in footage of other motorists breaking traffic laws.

Paul Marshall, of the Association of Chief Police Officers, said: “Increasing use is being made by the public of digital cameras to record evidence of offences which can be used by the police service to support prosecutions.”

One pioneer is Steve Warren from Staffordshire. Last August his cameras recorded a Vauxhall Vectra as it hurtled towards the back of his car, narrowly avoided a collision by swerving across double white lines and then sped through a junction on the wrong side of the road. He said: “Why should people be able to risk your life and get away with it? I sent the video to the police.”

Leicestershire police used Warren’s evidence to identify and prosecute the driver.

Another prosecution was prompted by a film shot in 2011 in Southall, near Heathrow, by Jag Dev. His camera recorded the car in front of him hitting an elderly man and speeding off. The female driver was later disqualified.

Dave Sherry, a bus driver from Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, has cameras on his bicycle, on which he commutes, and also in his car.

Matt Stockdale of PoliceWitness.com, which helps people to submit dashcam footage to the police, said: “Tens of thousands are recording their journeys. It’s only a matter of time before people start changing the way they drive because you just don’t know who is filming you.”

The Beast

• I'M AT a set of traffic lights with 1,000bhp under my right foot and a straight stretch of empty road ahead. Even at tickover, the noise inside the car’s cabin is deafening. Whatever is under the long bonnet in front of me is desperate to be let loose. I slip the transmission into Drive, press the accelerator pedal and say a silent prayer.
  
  Forty years ago this car was the talk of ashen-faced drivers everywhere. Motorists would return home trembling with tales of a car longer than a lorry, louder than a plane and as fast as a rocket. Today we marvel at the Bugatti Veyron’s 253mph top speed; back in the 1970s, the Beast was rumoured to be capable of that speed too and for a time it was officially the world’s fastest road car.
  
  Tales about the car abounded, and not all of them were urban myths. A German count reported being overtaken on the autobahn by the Beast being driven so quickly that his Porsche was left floundering in its wake. He mistook it for a Rolls-Royce and phoned the car maker demanding it build him one.
  
  In shaking tones, my father told me about the Beast and now I’m shaking too as I prepare to experience it for myself.
  
  As I stamp on the accelerator, a noise assaults my ears that is like 1,000 washing machines at maximum spin, all with their drums broken. The Beast clangs, clatters, bangs and shrieks. It’s a symphony orchestra falling into a scrapyard. It’s a corrugated iron shantytown rolling down a hill. I’m aware my arms are being pulled from their sockets, my stomach is churning and my life is passing before my eyes.
  
  The Beast
  Engine
  27,000cc, V12
  Power
  1,000bhp
  Torque
  1,450 lb ft
  Transmission
  3-speed automatic
  Acceleration
  0-60mph: 3.0sec (estimate)
  Top speed
  260mph (claimed)
  Fuel
  2mpg (range 92 miles)
  Road tax
  Free (historic vehicle)
  
  The Beast can cover a standing quarter mile in 10 seconds and has been timed at 183mph. Right now, with its speedo needle winding towards 70mph and 1,450 lb ft of torque surging through the driveshaft, I can believe it. But I can also believe that unusual things start to happen at such velocities and that this suburban road in Torremolinos, a Spanish town more used to bulls than beasts, is not the place to experience them.
  
  So I lift off the throttle, the Beast settles to a tolerably deafening clatter and I take stock of this awesome machine. The source of the Beast’s gnashing and wailing is a 27-litre Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. The Merlin is best known for powering Spitfires and Lancaster bombers in the Second World War but the one under the Beast’s extended bonnet comes from a Boulton Paul Balliol, an aircraft used by the RAF for flight crew training in the late 1940s. About 40 years ago it was fitted to a ladder-frame chassis and so was born one man’s satanic vision of a high-performance car.
  
  It was a vision that had first formed in the mind of a British engineer called Paul Jameson in the late 1960s. He would never be able to explain exactly why but one day he was seized by the idea of fitting an 850hp Meteor V12 engine from a Centurion tank to a 19ft-long chassis of his own design.
  
  He fitted a gearbox he thought capable of handling the Meteor, fired up the engine and, still without a body on the car, hared off down the runway at Biggin Hill airfield, Kent, to test his creation. At 120mph the clutch disintegrated and the car shuddered to a halt at the feet, incredibly, of an automatic gearbox specialist called John Dodd.
  
  Dodd had just flown into Biggin Hill with a plane-load of gearboxes and was soon telling Jameson how he’d build him a “step-up” gearbox that, once fitted, would enable the car to use one of his automatic boxes. It sounded plausible but some weeks later Jameson declared himself bored with the car and sold it to Dodd for £400.
  
  Today, Dodd is a trim, fiercely energetic 81-year-old living in Malaga on Spain’s Costa del Sol, from where he runs an automatic gearbox repair business. “I still don’t know why Jameson built the car or why he suddenly got bored with it,” he says. “But I snapped it up. I saw it could have great PR value.”
  
  The car ate two of Dodd’s gearboxes before declaring itself pleased with the third. He had a glass-fibre body made for it in the style of a stretched Ford Capri and, in a confident flourish that would later come to haunt him, attached a Rolls-Royce grille to the front. The car was ready to meet the world and Dodd wasted no time introducing it at motor shows and events across Europe. “I wanted to show people it was engineered to perfection,” he says.
  
  He also wanted to show them it was fast. In 1973 the RAC timed the car at 183mph at Biggin Hill (it was also timed at 75mph in reverse) and it entered the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s fastest road car. In 1975 disaster struck when it was destroyed by fire. But Dodd had the bug: a new one would rise from the ashes, even more powerful and outrageous than the first.
  
  To the old car’s restored chassis, Dodd attached a Merlin aircraft engine, a three-speed General Motors automatic gearbox and a lightly modified replica of the original body. He fitted Jaguar disc brakes but got the suspension from an Austin A110 Westminster, a family saloon with an engine considerably less powerful than a Merlin V12. The steering of the car remained unassisted. To complete the effect, Dodd once more fitted a Rolls-Royce grille to the car. He then had it registered by London county council which, fooled by the car’s Spirit of Ecstasy mascot, taxed it as a Rolls-Royce.
  
  Dodd and his car were soon back breaking speed records. On one occasion, claims Dodd, he outran a police helicopter on a drive from Ayr in southwest Scotland to Carlisle. A police Range Rover tried and failed to stop him. Dodd appeared in court but the case was dismissed when the police driver admitted he could not identify the speeding driver.
  
  One morning in 1981 Dodd received a High Court writ accusing him of trademark infringement. Rolls-Royce had wearied of Dodd and his use of its signature trappings for his car and decided to take action. The case attracted huge publicity. Dodd drove to the hearing each day in his car. On the fourth day his counsel quit, accusing him of making a mockery of the court. Later the same day, the judge criticised Dodd for his “cavalier” attitude to the case. The next day, Dodd arrived on horseback, proclaiming he had swapped a 1,000-horsepower form of transport for a single-horsepower one.
  
  It came as no surprise when Dodd was eventually found guilty of contempt for ignoring court orders about the car. He was fined £5,000 and ordered to pay the same in costs but the judge also enshrined the car’s name in legal history when he too referred to it as “the Beast”. Dodd lost an appeal the following year. Still declining to pay, he was sentenced to six months in jail and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He jumped in his Rolls-Royce (a real one) and fled to Spain. He had the Beast shipped out later and says all the legal wrangling has now been settled.
  
  The car’s name is as apt today as it was more than 30 years ago. It is 19ft and 2 tons of hideously proportioned custard-coloured awfulness. Today, in place of its Rolls-Royce grille and mascot, are the letters JD. The extended cabin looks as if it would accommodate four comfortably but it’s an illusion; there is space only for two. Which is just as well because it’s not easy to persuade anyone to come along for the ride.
  
  As befits a car with a Second World War aero engine, its starting procedure is akin to firing up a Spitfire. You turn an ignition key, flick two magneto switches, flick a third switch to prime the cylinder valves with neat fuel and press the starter button.
  
  The engine explodes into life, immediately filling the cabin with fumes from the exhausts down by the doors. Whereas a Spitfire’s supercharged Merlin engine roars and throbs, the Beast’s unblown V12 bangs and clatters furiously at its idling speed of 120rpm. “All that banging you can hear is torsional vibration,” yells Dodd from the passenger seat. “The propeller would have absorbed it. It disappears over 40mph,” he says, not entirely convincingly.
  
  The T-shaped shift lever on the elderly General Motors box is loose and flops around the gate. Like a co-pilot, Dodd is on hand to operate it while I concentrate on the car’s remaining controls.
  
  Controls? There’s a steering wheel but as we hurtle away from the traffic lights, I’m not sure it’s attached to the wheels. There are brakes, too, but they need a hefty shove to restrain the Beast. The trick to driving the Beast is to nail the throttle, before quickly lifting off and letting the momentum carry the car forward. Later, I learn why it’s not a good idea to mash the throttle in a roundabout, when the rear end steps out alarmingly. Amazingly, it tucks back into line with a few turns of the steering wheel.
  
  “I love this car,” shouts an unfazed Dodd. “It’s one of the most powerful cars on the road yet once you learn how to handle it, easy to control, too.”
  
  Later, I have the pleasure of parking in a narrow Torremolinos side street. Retired English people pour out of the cafes in astonishment, eager to shake Dodd’s hand and admire the Beast’s engine. “It’s a Merlin,” announces a beaming Dodd to the assembled throng.
  
  “Does it fly?” asks one elderly gent.
  
  I should say so.
                               

Cars Bikes and Cycles 

What was Australia’s cheapest new car, the $9,990 Chery J1, joined the list of banned imports in November because it doesn’t come with electronic stability control. The safety police decided the Chery wasn’t safe enough without ESC – something that was rare here not long ago - but they let anyone go play on the streets, roads and highways anytime on vastly less-safe vehicles called bicycles.

Bicycles don’t have ESC, or ABS or seat belts and airbags aren’t an option either – but if a sane person was given the choice of being in a Chery J1 or on a bike during any of the many nudges or minor prangs that occur on our roads every day, it’s four wheels good, two wheels not good at all. And, even without ESC, I’d back the Chery over the bike on the risks of it losing its balance, skidding out, or falling over after hitting a rock or a pot hole.

A bit like smoking, if the idea of riding bicycles on the open road was invented today, it would be banned. Indeed, there are promising new vehicles such as Renault’s electric Twizy that are not permitted here, things that fall somewhere between motorbikes and cars.

Some might think it harsh and insensitive to publish such thoughts when families and friends are grieving over the recent tragic deaths of cyclists, when you can only have sympathy and respect for their loss, but on that basis, the reality of playing a dangerous sport on the road would never be published as the deaths are far too regular – 14 in NSW alone last year, even as the overall road toll fell.

Yes, many more people are killed in cars than on bicycles – but many more people do many more kilometres in cars. And most of them are not doing it for their sport – they need to go somewhere.

In the end, we all make our choices, take the risks we choose and bear the consequences. What’s curious from the point of view of policy and the economic cost is the wildly different attitudes our governments and lobby groups have to different types of risk.

For example, our financial markets’ supposed watchpuppy, ASIC, forever retreats into the defence of disclosure: It’s fine for con artists to rip off mugs as long as the cons disclosure that whatever they’re selling isn’t 100 per cent guaranteed. The idea is that we should all be informed individuals responsible for taking whatever risks we like. Remember that ASIC gave Storm Financial a tick of approval just before it failed. Oh well, people should have known. Such laissez faire attitudes don’t apply to the Chery. If ASIC was running vehicle safety, an importer would be covered by putting a note in the sales contract stating: “This vehicle doesn’t have ESC, so it might not be as safe in some circumstances as cars with ESC, but that’s also why it’s cheap as chips. You should weigh up the risk/reward ratio for yourself.”

A reasonable person only has to look at a motorbike to understand that it’s a much riskier form of transport than a car – and that’s without riding in Queensland with friends. The safety campaigns for bikers go a small way to acknowledge that: in recommending the rider wear protective gear, the leathers and boots and pads and such, it is implicit that the rider may come off and be sent sliding and spinning into what fate physics and luck decide.

Motorbike riders will come off. Every rider I’ve known has put his or her machine down at some stage with varying degrees of inconvenience, frequency and pain. (As an aside, I sometimes wonder how the typical Harley buyer these days – a 40-year-old accountant – ever manages to pick up the bigger machines. Do they come with a jack?)

And they’ve been the lucky ones, the ones spared catastrophe, not sliding into on-coming traffic, not having backs snapped by roadside poles. As a cadet journalist assigned to the Brisbane Coroner’s Court, I had etched into my mind the evidence of a motorcycle policeman describing the scene of a fatal motorbike accident, his detailed description of road markings and human tissue. I’ll spare you the details I still clearly remember.

But they make their choices, motorbike riders, they take their risks. I get the impression some of the reason for riding is that risk – a belief that it’s a personal choice, that the person on the motorbike on the highway isn’t inconveniencing anyone else and therefore should be allowed the alleged “freedom” of riding.

The reaction of bicyclists to intimations of their mortality seems somewhat different. For a start, the average pushbike rider doesn’t wear clothing that concedes the possibility of coming off as they hit top speed down a hill. The nanny state has decreed the little helmets, but beyond that, well, lycra goes better than leather with physical exertion.

Some roads are inherently safer to ride on than others – wider, quieter, in better condition – and thus relatively safe for pursuing their chosen sport. There seems to be an attitude among the more evangelical cyclists though that all roads should be made safe for them to play or exercise on, that it’s someone else’s fault that their chosen sport is very dangerous and that they have a right to make motorised vehicles play by their rules.

There is no place for road rage, the driver and the cyclist should be friends, but there are roads where cycling is unsafe, where it creates hazards for the cyclist and the motorist and inconveniences traffic that tends to already be inconvenienced enough. Every cluster of deaths provokes an examination of attitudes, generally with an inference that it’s all the horseless carriage’s fault.

No, a cyclist should not be allowed to struggle up a hill in the T3 lane. The one-metre passing rule is entirely sensible and necessary, but having to swing into another lane to overtake a cyclist creates its own risks. There’s a case to be made for minimum as well as maximum speeds on major roads, conditions permitting.

There’s a case here for a Productivity Commission investigation – a risk/reward, efficiency/cost comparison of the Chery J1 and the pushbike. Similarly, some clarity on the value of bicycle lanes would be helpful. It strikes me that many of the lanes in Sydney’s CBD are only of use while not many cyclists use them – they’re not wide enough to handle the sort of bike traffic numbers that would justify them.

A look at why cycling works in some cities and not in others and London’s cycling evangelists’ desire for a greater role in city transport (as opposed to sport and fitness regimes) by the Economist came to the conclusion that it would only take off where motorised traffic congestion become intolerable. There’s irony in too many cars becoming the cycling fanatics’ friends. The bike works best in old European cities that weren’t designed for cars in the first place.

But such a Productivity Commission exercise would have to also include public transport – and a strong finding in favour of concentrating investment on buses, trains, trams and ferries would offend too many vested interests in both the road building and cycling fraternities. So it won’t happen. Which leaves cyclists with the terrible truth that theirs is a dangerous sport and will remain so, even without motorists. And with the best will in the world from motorists, the reality of cars is that they are forever coming into contact with each other, so it can’t be a surprise that they also will accidentally collide with less visible and much more vulnerable cyclists.

Without checking the numbers, I’d guess cycling overtook rock fishing as our most dangerous sport last year. On a mortality count, it’s certainly more dangerous than all the football codes – but we don’t let people play rugby on the road, generally. The bicycle is more dangerous than Australia’s most dangerous animal, the horse.

Beyond the angst and sorrow every death causes, it would be nice to have some consistency in policy. Allow freedom of choice with disclosure of risks across the board – and therefore readmit the Chery J1 and welcome innovative quadricycles such as the Twizy – or extend the culture of enforced safety to greater regulation of where and when people are allowed to cycle, run or play cricket on public roads.      

eCall and Tracking 

‘EVERY MOVE you make, every step you take, I’ll be watching you.” The Police were happy to admit to spying in their 1980s classic, but today the real police are a little more coy about confirming that they can for the first time track car drivers without having to install bugging devices or rely on a suspect’s mobile phone being switched on.

A gadget fitted by car manufacturers to improve driver safety can also be used by law enforcement agencies to pinpoint suspects.

The device, eCall, is designed to contact the emergency services automatically if it detects the vehicle has been involved in a collision. The black box is already fitted to many production cars including certain BMWs, Citroëns and Volvos, and will be installed in all new cars by 2015 under EU regulations.

Unbeknown to most drivers, it can also be used to track motorists remotely even if they haven’t been involved in a crash. Interpol, which co-ordinates police intelligence across 190 countries, confirmed that some of its members are using the eCall system for surveillance operations, though it refused to say whether British police were using the technology in this way.

The Sunday Times submitted freedom of information requests to 10 forces asking whether they were using eCall to track the movements of drivers they suspected of wrongdoing. Five forces — City of London, Thames Valley, Merseyside, Northamptonshire and Essex — refused to disclose the information on national security grounds, one of the few reasons government bodies can use to block such requests. The response from Northamptonshire police was typical. It claimed that rules designed to protect intelligence services and their sources prevented the force from answering our questions. It also said that disclosing the figures could assist suspects with the potential to “undermine the operational integrity of anti-terror operations and will adversely affect public safety”.

The police said their response could not be interpreted as an admission or a denial, though the Hertfordshire and Nottinghamshire forces were happy to confirm they did not track drivers. Two forces failed to respond and a third said it would be too time-consuming to supply information.

Privacy campaigners say drivers are entitled to know whether they could be tracked in this way. “These black boxes are going to become commonplace, tracking where we are and what we are doing in our cars,” says Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch, which campaigns for data privacy. “It is essential that our already outdated surveillance laws are updated to make sure that new technology cannot be exploited to track where we drive without proper oversight.”

Until now, the police could only remotely track drivers by attaching a homing device or via their mobile phone — the latter a technique used extensively by security forces across the world. However, it relies on the phone being powered and receiving a signal. The alternative is to use automatic numberplate-recognition cameras, which use software to identify registration plates and retrieve data about the identity of the car’s owner. Although already a common sight on many British roads and fitted to most patrol cars, the cameras are not effective at tracking the movements of individual cars over long distances or on a day-to-day basis because they rely on the car passing the network of cameras.

The eCall system can in theory be used to track any vehicle fitted with it over large distances, 24 hours a day. Like a mobile, it uses a Sim card to connect to any of the mobile networks. As long as that card is connected, police can patch themselves into eCall’s sensors and retrieve data about a car’s exact location, speed and direction without the driver’s knowledge. It is unclear what authority the police would need to access the system or what constitutes the “reasonable suspicion” officers would need to legally tap into it.

Driver privacy is set to be a growing concern over the next five years, according to motor industry experts, as cars become ever more technologically sophisticated. Systems that allow cars to connect to the internet in order to play music, download apps or access navigation tools mean that car makers know more about their customers’ driving habits than ever before.

Earlier this month, Ford’s global vice-president of marketing and sales, Jim Farley, appeared to suggest the company had a large database of owners’ movements. “We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you’re doing it,” he said. “We have GPS in your car, so we know what you’re doing.” The next day, Farley retracted his comments, saying he had been describing a hypothetical scenario. “We do not track our customers in their cars without their approval or their consent,” he said.

Even so, Ford’s current brochure for cars including the Focus, B-Max, Fiesta and Kuga in Britain contains a licence agreement that states that anyone using the car’s dashboard software, supplied by Microsoft, agrees to the conditions listed. These include consent for Ford, Microsoft or “affiliates” to “collect and use technical information gathered in any manner”.

Ford says there are no applications on its British cars that currently transmit data but that could change. If so, the company has promised that drivers will be told and will have positively to accept it before the company collects data.

“There is nothing in data protection legislation that is specific to vehicle manufacturers but the key thing is that they tell people what they are doing,” says Ruth Boardman, head of the international privacy and data protection group at the law firm Bird & Bird. “They need to ensure that they don’t collect data which is excessive or irrelevant and that they don’t retain it for longer than is necessary.”      

What are the best bargaining techniques when buying a car from a dealer?  

My short list of negotiating tactics: 1. Don't negotiate. Tell the salesperson and sales manager that you'll sign the paperwork the minute they hit your target figure. Politely decline any counter-offers, give them your phone number, and leave. If the price you've proposed is within the realm of possibility, they'll call you at some point.

2. Follow-up on Saturday or Sunday nights an hour before closing time. Call and ask to speak with the salesperson or manager you've spoken to before. Remind them you're a buyer when they meet your figure, but that they shouldn't waste your time if they won't.

If your offer is possible, the opportunity to do one more deal before the end of the day might compel them to work with you...especially if the dealership is having a bad weekend.

3. Follow-up on the last day of the month. Again, salespeople and managers are often under pressure to find one more deal before the month ends. A deal that didn't make sense on the 25th might make sense on the 31st if the month hasn't met expectations.

4. Follow-up on days that have had terrible weather. A major snowstorm, a day of wind and rain, etc. can dramatically affect car sales. Call and remind the salesperson or manager that you're happy to come down when they meet your offer. Again, the fact that they're not selling cars might get them to bend in your favor.

5. Rinse, wash and repeat. Do the same process concurrently with a couple of other dealers in your area. Make sure they have the car you want, and then give them their mission.

6. Know what a car is worth. If you're buying a new car, Edmunds.com and TrueCar.com provide "true market" estimates that are reasonably accurate. If you're buying a used car, KBB.com is a great resource, as it will tell you both retail value and wholesale (aka trade-in) value.

My suggestion is to try and buy a new car for $500-$1000 less than true market value. This is aggressive, but assuming that you've got time and you're willing to work the phone, you can often find a dealership willing to dip into their holdback (financial reserve) to make one more deal.

If you're buying a used car, I'd try for a 10-15% discount off of wholesale (trade-in) value. It's damn difficult, but every now and then a dealer will take a car in on trade at below market value. If you make this kind of aggressive offer, you might get it every now and again.

Of course, you can always just offer true market value (new) or wholesale value (used). That will make getting a deal much easier...but what's the fun in that? :-)

7. Secure your own financing if you can. A great way to avoid the drama in the finance office is to get a loan from your local credit union. However, if you're buying a new car and you want to take advantage of a special interest rate (like 0%), you're going to have to work with the dealership's finance person.

Quite frankly, I don't see what the big deal is about going through finance. It's true that you're going to be brought into a small room with a very good salesperson, and that he or she is going to pitch you all sorts of stuff. You're an adult. You can handle this. Be polite, but say no to everything. It's not personal, it's just business.

If you've got bad credit, the dealership finance office is going to help you out (at least a little bit). However, this doesn't mean you need to do them a favor and buy a warranty or something...just say no.

8. Always be polite. In some of the other answers to this question, I've read suggestions about telling the dealer to "take it or leave it," threatening to walk out, etc. This is all bad advice.

There are a lot of things that suck about working at a car dealership, not the least of which is being treated like crap by most of the people you deal with. While dealership employees learn how to "warm customers up" - it usually only takes a minute or two to get a stranger to laugh and relax a little - it's emotionally draining.

Therefore, when someone starts dictating terms and making threats, most salespeople and sales managers will respond aggressively. It's human nature. Instead of finding a way to make a deal, you'll be told to wait an hour because someone is "on the phone with Japan"

Therefore, be nice and respectful to everyone you deal with. If you're a genuinely nice person, I'm far more likely to do something unusual for you (like selling a car for less than invoice) than I am if you're a grade AAA jerk.

What's more, dealerships are now frequently paid on their overall customer satisfaction scores. Polite and courteous customers are far more likely to give a dealership a positive review, and dealers know it. A dealer's worst-case scenario is to cheap sell a car to someone who gives them a lousy review on the manufacturer's satisfaction survey. Not only did you fail to make money, but you get yelled at by the GM or owner for doing a bad job.

Top Gear

IS there, inside every man's head, a nine-year-old boy who never grows up? If so, it has eluded surgeons, but not the makers of Top Gear. The show has built up a worldwide audience in 170 countries with its formula of puerile humour, shouting, falling over and setting caravans on fire.

As it enters its 21st series, audiences will be treated to the sight of three men putting on false moustaches, driving a tank through a building and skidding round a supermarket demolishing shelves. Is it all a little unseemly, given that Jeremy Clarkson, 53, has a bald patch big enough to be seen from space and needs reading glasses as powerful as the Hubble telescope (according to his co-presenters), while James May, 51, wears his paisley shirts untucked, allegedly to disguise his midriff, and Richard Hammond, 44, has remarkably dark hair and an impressively white smile?

Yes, it is unseemly, but it appeals to the small boy in most men - and that's what matters, says Andy Wilman, the executive producer, who has been at the helm of Top Gear for all 21 series.

"Quite a few viewers often complain that we don't review real-world, everyday cars that people actually drive. Have we matured? Sadly, no. In show two [for example], Jeremy drives the new £900,000 McLaren P1. Bottom line: almost everything we filmed was aimed at people with a mental age of nine."

It's a long way from the programme's origins when Top Gear was a 'serious' magazine programme, attempting to enlighten viewers about the pluses and minuses of cars they might buy. Launched in 1977, it was first hosted by the former newsreader Angela Rippon, and subsequent presenters included Noel Edmonds and William Woollard.

In those days, according to Wilman, motoring journalists could claim to be a kind of fourth emergency service, whose advice could mean the difference between life and death. Cars were shoddily assembled by workshy militants in the Midlands, angry Bolsheviks in France or, worse still, Italians.

The advice of motoring journalists was essential to warn you about cars that could collapse mid-corner because half the components were missing, or could simply disintegrate because of rust. Those days are gone. Italian cars don't oxidise any more, Skoda jokes fall flat and in consumer satisfaction surveys even the worst cars score two-thirds or more. "We used to write that the Princess was tricky to drive because Red Robbo had forgotten to fit a steering wheel. Now we complain that the steering on a Megane is 'slightly vague'," says Wilman.

So Top Gear reinvented itself in 2002, not as a programme about cars but as a programme about men talking about cars. The difference was subtle but crucial. Other car shows, some of which stuck to the belief that what viewers wanted was detailed information on engine displacement, torque and warranties, found themselves parked on obscure satellite channels or on the scrapheap.

The list of casualties goes on and on like the cast of Ben-Hur and includes well-made shows such as Vroom Vroom, dropped from Sky; Pulling Power, axed from ITV; Used Car Roadshow, discontinued on Men & Motors and ITV4; and Deals on Wheels, scrapped by Channel 4.

Top Gear has spluttered on, slowly gathering viewers not just in the UK but around the world. It has become the main moneyspinner for BBC Worldwide, the Beeb's commercial arm, and dominates searches on iPlayer. So much so that a new satellite channel, BBC Brit, will soon allow men around the world to slob in front of the gogglebox watching Clarkson, May and Hammond shout at each other.

The three presenters may be older but they haven't matured, and their creakiness makes the rigours they are put through even funnier.

Wilman says: "Given that Jeremy and James have both passed 50 and Richard has finally admitted that 39 candles is fooling no one, you might think [we'd] go a little easier on them. All I'd say, then, is watch out for the latest road trip. No quarter is being given - or asked for. Yet."

Series preview by Andy Wilman, producer

Nobody tells us anything round here, but apparently BBC Worldwide is 'revving up' to make Top Gear the big cheese of a new global channel aimed at manly chaps everywhere. It's a good job we've got some new content - seven freshly baked programmes, all made on the premises. What's more, I'm actually looking forward to watching them go out on the telly. The last series was made at a hell of a lick and, if I'm honest, was a bit patchy. This one, though - this one smells strong.

Eighties hot hatches

We kick off the series with an argument. The kids who run the Top Gear office think 1980s hot hatches must have been rubbish compared with a modern Seat or Fiesta ST. Jeremy, James and Richard, respectively 53, 51 and whatever he's pretending this week, strongly beg to differ. So confident are they that they buy three sub-£800 hot hatches from the Duran Duran era - a VW Golf Mk 2, a Ford Fiesta XR2 and a Vauxhall Nova SRi - and dare the young producers to find some challenges. What unfolds is a cracking mixture of laughter and lowbrow. To celebrate the lost 1980s art of ram raiding, there is a timed rally stage around supermarket aisles. In homage to all those early Police Stop Youth Round a Housing Estate TV shows, there is a chase involving tanks, moustaches and Jerry Bruckheimer explosions that will knock the ornaments off your telly. And yet there is also a touching yearning for the days before hi-vis jackets. I believe many dads, mullets long gone, will be wiping away a little tear.

Burma

Every series is the better for one of our Christmas specials, and this year we're travelling across one of the great enigmatic countries of the modern age - Burma. Getting permission to film there took an age, so long in fact that this particular Christmas special is going out in March, but I hope you agree it's worth the wait. Given that the three of them have tried most forms of vehicle on these trips, from 4x4s to Lancias to motorbikes, we thought we'd ring the changes by challenging them to be Burmese lorry drivers. And so the boys gather in Rangoon with three trucks bought off the internet, knowing that they're old (but not how old), that they have engines of some sort, and that somewhere along the way Richard's seat has been replaced with a church pew.

They set off on a surreal 1,000-mile journey that is easily the toughest yet. In fact when they enter the usually forbidden northern Shan state, it descends into Top Apocalypse Now Gear. We were the first western TV crew to be allowed in there, and I can't help feeling sorry for the locals that instead of meeting Sir David Attenborough or Joanna Lumley, they got our three.

Now, normally at the end of these road trips, the finish line is the cue for the credits to roll, but not this time, because when they reach their destination, Richard, James and Jeremy have to complete a specially tough task. Put all that together and it's no surprise that this special is, like last year's Africa trip, going to be broadcast in two parts.

World's dullest road trip

Yeah, that's a title most petrolheads don't want to read in the TV listings, but that's what you're getting. In truth, though, I'd advise you stick with this little adventure, because we pride ourselves on the fact that we can make boring entertaining. The cars are the new breed of one-litre hatchbacks - James finally gets to consummate his love affair with the Dacia Sandero - and the country they have to cross is Ukraine. Sadly, nobody told them that not only is it enormous, but it's also a sort of Soviet Nebraska whose landscape never changes. True, the place is peppered with nuclear submarine bases and Crimean War hotspots, but that can't keep our heroes amused for long, so they have to entertain themselves by learning in-car skills such as embroidery and magic. And just when they think the hardship's over, they're given a specific amount of petrol and told to make it to the border. Along the way, though, there's quite an obstacle - Chernobyl.

And the rest ...

Besides the big monster films, there is an assortment of hard and soft centres to choose from in the lower tier of the chocolate box. In Italy, for example, Richard sets off to have a nice time finding out what the new Alfa Romeo 4C is all about, and then has his party gatecrashed by Jeremy who is eager to give him a race the length of Lake Como.

James is in Afghanistan, with tin hat on, looking at the operation to repatriate all Britain's military vehicles - the biggest such movement since the Second World War.

There are some landmark cars too. Jeremy gets his first experience of the fearsome Eau Rouge corner on Belgium's Spa circuit, scarily for him in McLaren's 900bhp P1. Is it any good? Well, in 40 years I've never seen Jeremy struggle for words, but this time . . .

Richard, meanwhile, is in Dubai trying out our other hypercar, the Porsche 918. Also, Mercedes has brought out a six-wheeled version of its AMG G 63, and you have two choices. You can either wait till the next Die Hard comes out to see it in action, or watch Richard take it (via a waterpark full of holiday-makers) across the incredible Empty Quarter, 250,000 square miles of sand dunes on the Arabian peninsula.

So there we are: Call the Midwife or us. You know which button to press.      

The Economics of Self Drive Cars  

Cars that can drive safely and reliably without human supervision are no longer science fiction. Indeed, cars are becoming smarter—they’re equipped with novel sensors for navigation and environment perception, wireless networking devices to communicate with other vehicles and roadside infrastructure, and computers for running sophisticated real-time planning and control algorithms (see “The Internet of Cars Is Approaching a Crossroads”). Several companies and universities have demonstrated vehicles that can drive autonomously in traffic, in the process building social awareness and pushing the boundaries of current regulations and risk management practices.

At this point, a natural question to ask is: what is the point of autonomous cars? To demonstrate that autonomy is indeed a transformative technology with the potential to drastically redefine mobility, let’s consider some of the foreseen benefits of autonomous cars, and put them in financial context.

Perhaps the most obvious benefit is increased safety. Human error is the leading cause of traffic accidents. Computers, on the other hand, do not get distracted, fatigued, or drunk. They’re not subject to road rage, and they have faster reaction times than humans. Hence, autonomous cars could dramatically reduce accident rates. Avoiding injuries and loss of life is clearly an extremely desirable, almost priceless, outcome for those affected and their families and friends. Financially speaking, the cost of traffic accidents in 2009 has been evaluated to be about $300 billion a year.

Another benefit of autonomy is the potential increase in traffic efficiency, and the ensuing reduction in congestion, as autonomous vehicles can precisely monitor one another’s position and coӧrdinate their motion to an extent impossible for human drivers. Furthermore, autonomous vehicles can travel at speeds that minimize emissions. The cost of congestion, including lost productivity and public health consequences of the pollution, has been estimated by the Texas Transportation Institute (pdf) and by the Harvard School of Public Health to be about $150 billion each year.

A fully autonomous car, which doesn’t require its driver to pay attention and be ready to take control, could also relieve people from the most burdensome aspects of driving. What is the value of the time that people can get back from driving to pursue a more desirable or productive activity, such as relaxing, watching a movie, working, or texting to their heart’s content? There are about 210 million licensed drivers in the U.S., spending on average 465 hours per year driving a car; assuming a value of time of one half the average hourly wages, i.e., $12 per hour, the societal benefit due to increased productivity and leisure time is roughly $1.2 trillion a year.

Finally, another potential major benefit of autonomous vehicles is the enabling of widespread car sharing. Car-sharing services are growing worldwide, but typically do not offer one-way, door-to-door rental options. Or, if they do, they often suffer from limited car availability. If shared cars could drive to a customer’s pickup location and return to a parking station by themselves upon drop off, they could offer an unprecedented level of convenience. Financially, car sharing distributes the cost (in terms of dollars and of time) of purchasing, maintaining, and insuring autonomous vehicles across a large user base. In addition, autonomous shared cars will eliminate the need to look and pay for a parking spot, and will reduce the time needed to walk to and from the parked vehicle. An estimate of the average benefit of autonomous vehicle sharing, assuming a sharing factor of four (i.e., each autonomous car replaces four private cars), is about $8,700 a year, which at the aggregate level amounts to $1.8 trillion each year in the U.S. More details on this analysis are available in a research study conducted by myself and colleagues.

Within the limits of the approximations and assumptions made, the above estimates suggest that autonomous driving is indeed a transformative technology, with a potential financial benefit to U.S. on the order of more than $3 trillion per year. It is interesting that the benefits due to increased safety and reduced congestion pale in comparison with those due to sharing and increased productivity. In particular, the synergy between autonomy and car sharing is readily apparent.

The economics seem huge, but these estimates must be taken with a grain of salt. For example, they don’t take into account latent demand—in other words, should a new mode of transportation arise, offering the convenience of a “robotic chauffeur” at an affordable price, will the demand for mobility increase? More generally, what would be the effect of autonomous cars on, say, congestion? Autonomous shared cars could end up traveling more miles than private cars because of the empty trips to pick up customers. On the other hand, it may be the case that empty trips will take place predominantly along routes with a low traffic volume, thus not increasing congestion significantly. These are unresolved questions, and they’re the focus of ongoing research.

Yet the analysis indicates that autonomy could transform, in a very essential way, the current model of car ownership and usage, enabling a paradigm shift toward a service-centered model of personal mobility, with possibly profound consequences on our lives, our cities, and the automotive industry.      

Hacking Car Computers  

When your home computer is hacked, the things at risk are your identity, finances and other digital assets. A cyber attack that can take control of your car—especially while you’re driving—raises the stakes considerably. As carmakers transform their vehicles into networked computers on wheels, concern has grown about hacker attacks on automobile systems and the seriousness of the threat.

Computer scientists have in recent years demonstrated the ability to remotely unlock car doors, start or stop an engine and even tamper with brakes. Fortunately, despite those demonstrations, “right now it’s extremely hard to compromise a car’s computer systems,” acknowledges Charlie Miller, a security engineer at Twitter. Miller has spent quite a bit of time in recent years working with Chris Valasek, director of security intelligence at IOActive, probing automobiles for security vulnerabilities. “It takes a lot of time, resources and technological expertise, but at the same time it’s possible.”

That possibility is not good news for car companies that want to build interfaces into their vehicles so they can communicate with one another as well as sensors built into traffic signals, roads and other infrastructure. Automobiles have already become sophisticated networks controlled by dozens of computers—called electronic control units (ECUs)—that manage critical, real-time systems such as steering, air-bag deployment and braking as well as less critical components including the ignition, lights and “infotainment” console. Software, sometimes consisting of up to 100 million lines of code, tells these ECUs what to do and when to do it. Carmakers connect multiple ECUs together within the vehicle using an internal communications network known as a controller area network (CAN).

Car hackers

Miller and Valasek are perhaps best known for a presentation at last summer’s Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas that described in detail how they used a MacBook to take control of ECUs in a Toyota Prius and a Ford Escape, both model year 2010. The researchers connected their laptop via a cable to each car’s data port to fool the vehicles’ computers into taking any number of inappropriate actions while on the road—such as braking suddenly at high speed and steering into oncoming traffic.

The researchers’ laboratories on wheels came courtesy of more than $80,000 in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Cyber Fast Track program. Not all cybersecurity researchers have a car they can sacrifice in the name of science, of course—which is why Miller and Valasek have spent the past several months developing a presentation that demonstrates car hacking on the cheap. At this week’s Symposium on Security for Asia Network (SyScan) in Singapore, they will explain how others can buy individual ECUs and hook them up to create a simulated in-car computer network. The SyScan talk “goes into detail on how to get into car hacking even without a car,” Miller says. “If we have enough smart people looking at it, we can find problems and have discussions” about how to improve automotive computer security.

Firewall on the go

Miller and Valasek have taken the long view to this point. They find security flaws they hope carmakers will address as they design new vehicles, a process that takes years. For the near term, the researchers have created a prototype plug-in automotive firewall to identify and stop potentially malicious network traffic entering and traveling between a car’s computers. The firewall connects to a car via its on-board diagnostic system (OBD–II) port, but Miller says the device could potentially be wired into the car elsewhere or built directly into an ECU.

“When the car detects a network attack, it could do something as drastic as shut down the car’s computer network, or it could simply turn on the engine light to signal to the driver that there’s a problem,” Miller says. If the car’s network were shut down, the driver might lose power steering or antilock brakes as well as more sophisticated systems that signal when the vehicle is drifting out of its lane. However, a motorist would still be able to steer to the side of the road and stop. Miller and Valasek plan to provide more detail about the project at this summer’s Defcon conference.

Other attacks

Miller and Valasek’s work is part of a much larger body of research to probe whether increasingly connected cars are likewise increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks.

At last week’s Black Hat Asia hacker conference in Singapore, researchers Alberto Garcia Illera and Javier Vazquez Vidal demonstrated a two-stage attack. Using a custom-made plug-in device, they first gather data from a car’s computers. Then they manipulate this data to prevent the driver from being able to control the vehicle. “So it's basically as if two people are talking, and suddenly we cover the mouth of one of them and start speaking for him, so he is no longer taking part [in] the conversation, and we take over his identity,” Vidal says. Illera and Vidal were able to do their research with the help of a tool they made for less than $25.

More disconcerting are efforts to break into car computers wirelessly. In March 2011, Stefan Savage, a University of California, San Diego computer science professor, and Tadayoshi Kohno, an associate computer science and engineering professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, described their efforts to insert malicious software into a car’s computer system using the vehicle’s Bluetooth and cell phone connections. Such an attack could enable an intruder to use a mobile phone to unlock car doors and start the engine remotely. This experiment followed earlier U.C. San Diego and University of Washington efforts—similar to those of Miller and Valasek—using a laptop plugged into the OBD–II port under a test car's dashboard to take control of its ECUs. Among other things, the OBD-II system was able to disable the brakes, selectively brake individual wheels on demand, and stop the engine—all independent of the driver's efforts (pdf).

Researchers from iSEC Partners (a San Francisco-based security firm) in August 2011 likewise claimed to have wirelessly broken into a 1998 Subaru Outback using their PC. In less than 60 seconds, they found the car’s security system module, bypassed it and started the engine. They could hack into a securely locked car because its alarm relied on a cell phone or satellite network that could receive commands via text messaging. Devices connecting via a cellular or satellite network are assigned the equivalent of a phone number or Web address. If hackers can figure out the number or address for a particular car, according to iSEC, they could use a PC to send commands via text messages that instruct the car to disarm, unlock and start. The researchers at the time acknowledged that stealing a particular car would be difficult because a thief would have to know that car’s number or address, neither of which are easy to find.

Countermeasures

Each of these experiments shares a common characteristic—a controlled environment in which to create chaos, as opposed to attacks on random vehicles on the road.

Still, car companies and government agencies insist they are taking automotive cybersecurity threats seriously. General Motors and Toyota claim to be working on the problem, whether it’s testing their vehicles against wireless attacks, encrypting network data or working with groups like SAE International to develop industry-wide security standards. Ford also has a cybersecurity team that is ready to respond to reports of malicious hacking of its vehicles, according to Don Butler, executive director of Connected Vehicles and Services.

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), meanwhile, created its Electronic Systems Safety Division in 2011 to monitor existing computerized capabilities—such as stability control, adaptive cruise control and automated lane centering—as well as emerging technologies that make automobiles increasingly autonomous. The division’s responsibilities include the development of research to address, among other things, “on-board tamper-proofing, hacking, and malicious external control,” according to the NHTSA.

Vidal is encouraged by the response he’s seen within the automotive industry. “The average [driver] should not panic but know that the security in vehicles is being taken into consideration in order to improve it,” he says. “Companies are really working on it, and it is improving at incredible speed.”

Miller, however, says he and Valasek haven’t received much direct input from either the government or carmakers as a result of last year’s Defcon demo. That’s not unusual—he doesn’t hear from Apple either when he reports bugs in its iPhone software—but he hopes the silence isn’t a sign that his and other security research is being dismissed. Miller points out that cyber attackers have found ways to defeat firewalls and encryption meant to protect ordinary computers and that they could eventually do the same thing with a car’s embedded systems.

“We might not see anything like this for a while,” Miller adds, “But it’s better to start thinking about it now.”      

Self Driving Cars  

Google's Self-Driving Car Already Drives Better Than You Do      

Self Driving Cars  

Google's Next Self-Driving Car: No Steering Wheel      

GM OnStar 

As General Motors overhauls its approach to safety, one powerful tool may be a technology that dates back two decades — the OnStar in-car assistance system.

Yet in the automaker’s recent flurry of recalls, with new safety problems announced in millions of cars, the automaker says none were prompted by analysis of the voluminous OnStar data it collects. And the company declined to discuss how it is using OnStar to investigate safety problems, citing competitive reasons. It would say only that OnStar is being used to notify owners of G.M. vehicles about the recent recalls, which now have reached about 29 million for the year.

G.M.'s 1960s-vintage Driver Aid, Information and Routing system used a clever combination of C.B. radios, sensors and buried magnets to do most of the things OnStar does today.

But analysts say that OnStar, which has more than seven million subscribers and clocks an average of 100,000 emergency responses a month, could be an effective tool for G.M. in its drive to revamp its safety practices. So far, the automaker has hired 35 new specialists to investigate potential defects and named a new vice president in charge of safety. OnStar, analysts say, can be especially useful in spotting trends in ways in which other methods fall short.

“It’s not a common technology that others have,” said Jesse Toprak, chief analyst at the website Cars.com. “But only if they use it.”

At the heart of the OnStar system is a link to the vehicle’s computerized brain, which collects more than 1,000 separate measurements on virtually every aspect of the vehicle’s health. What are the fluid levels? How is the engine running? Are the air bags functioning? Did they just deploy?

Subscribers who receive OnStar’s monthly diagnostic emails see a few dozen of those measurements. G.M. itself gets them all. The company can analyze that data, looking across thousands or even millions of vehicles in search of safety problems. But G.M. remains tight-lipped about how it uses OnStar data.

“OnStar, like many other parts of G.M., will be leveraged, where applicable, as part of the larger company efforts to improve the overall quality, safety and total ownership experience related to its vehicles,” a G.M. spokeswoman, Kelly Cusinato, said in a statement.

Jack R. Nerad, senior analyst at the auto research firm Kelley Blue Book, said that some at G.M. might be worried that if OnStar data analysis became a significant way to spot safety problems, the company could face pressure to share its methods and even its technology.

“You could have people start asking, why shouldn’t everyone benefit from this?” he said.

Mr. Nerad noted that one of the most significant safety advances in the history of cars, the three-point seatbelt, was developed by Volvo — but the company wound up sharing the invention for all automakers to use. “They didn’t keep it to themselves,” Mr. Nerad said.

G.M. would not comment, for instance, on how OnStar data could be used to track moving stalls — which after years of being labeled a matter of “convenience” are now considered a safety problem.

But a former OnStar employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that while the system might not capture data on the ignition switches specifically at issue in numerous recent recalls, other data points could, in theory, act as proxies for detecting stalls.

“If you look for the engine being off, while at the same time the car shift is in drive, then that’s one way,” he said.

The former employee said OnStar technology was tapped in the late 2000s when a mysterious problem arose with an engine part in the Cadillac CTS. Reports were coming in about the problem, and G.M. started investigating. It found the culprit to be motor oil levels that were too low, creating too much friction on the engine part. But finding the cause of the low levels proved difficult.

Engineers schooled in OnStar analysis were able to harness the data from all available CTS models, examine the information and use it to find the cause. It turned out to be deceptively simple: The “check oil” light was not configured properly. The timing was off, the OnStar analysts determined, so drivers were not changing the oil when they needed to. That information was passed up the chain, and the oil light was recalibrated, solving the problem. “It all came down to a light sensor issue — who would have guessed?” the former employee said. “I’m not sure how long it could have taken to figure out otherwise, but using OnStar, the cause was found much earlier.” OnStar was introduced to much fanfare in the mid-1990s, offering features quite revolutionary for the time, like the ability to call for help directly from a car. But it later languished for years, was the subject of speculation about a spinoff and became thought of by consumers mainly as a device to call the police after a crash. It was a Commodore 64 in a MacBook world, an outmoded technology trying to keep up against flashier, more nimble competitors.

Now, as G.M. is rolling out a revamped version of OnStar that includes a 4G Internet connection, its most important attribute might be one it has had from the start, the connection to the car’s brain.

But even before the recent safety push, G.M. had already used the OnStar information for internal investigations or studies.

A G.M.-sponsored study originally conducted in 2001, and again in 2009, involved distracted driving. The 2009 report used OnStar data to examine air bag deployments and drivers’ use of a hands-free phone system — both of which OnStar monitors. The researchers looked at 91 million calls made by OnStar drivers over a 30-month period and compared them with incidents of air bag deployments, trying to determine if there was a significant connection.

In 2007, G.M. published a study that used OnStar to identify instances in which air bags did not deploy. The data captured from OnStar showed certain cases where air bags did not go off in crashes that may have met the company’s threshold for that to happen.

Then in 2011, G.M. published a study through SAE International, the engineering organization, that examined crash rates for vehicles with advanced features like blind-spot warnings and lane-departure detectors. That study, written by two G.M. employees, began, “The OnStar system represents a unique and powerful mechanism to assess field crash rates.”

The study added, “Recognizing that this data represents an opportunity to assess field events, G.M. Engineering and OnStar have begun to examine how to utilize such data to assess crash rates.” The report went on to describe how tapping OnStar data in vehicles equipped with lane-departure and blind-spot alerts allowed researchers to compare the effectiveness of those features to similar vehicles without them.

While much automotive research is done in a lab, at a proving ground or with company-owned vehicles, OnStar allowed G.M. researchers to analyze how tens of thousands of real-world vehicles performed over time.

“This approach represents a new, useful approach to assessing field crash rates, potentially providing better estimates of field effectiveness than has been possible through current approaches,” the 2011 study concluded.

G.M. has encountered public resistance about privacy issues surrounding OnStar and how individual data is used. The company has said the detailed diagnostic data it harvests every month from subscribers and stores on its servers does not identify individual drivers. But aspects remain unclear.

“We’re all a little in the dark,” said James S. Rogers, a lawyer based in Seattle who is representing clients in cases related to the G.M. ignition switch recalls. He said that consumers should be told specifically if G.M. uses their data to root out safety problems, and if so, how.

Mr. Toprak, the Cars.com analyst, said G.M. might be keeping silent about OnStar’s role in its current safety efforts to avoid public pressure.

“It might open up the discussion that G.M. knows everything, that they’re capturing all of this data, but they’re not doing anything about it,” he said.      

Nudging Speeding Drivers 

ON average, vehicles seriously injure or kill someone in New York every two hours; last year, 173 pedestrians were killed. Last week Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed a bill allowing New York City to enact a citywide default speed limit of 25 miles per hour as part of its “Vision Zero” campaign to reduce traffic deaths to nil.

As much political wrangling as the bill took, a sterner challenge to the new limit looms: Getting drivers to obey it. What, after all, is so dangerous about driving 5 or 10 m.p.h. above the new speed, a difference the driver may hardly register?

When the speed at which a car strikes a pedestrian rises a mere 10 m.p.h. — to 40 m.p.h. from 30 — the chance of the pedestrian’s dying rises to 85 percent from 45. The real question is not absolute speed but appropriate speed. Take Germany: Parts of its autobahn network are speed limit free, but many inner-city zones mandate 30 kilometers per hour (that’s 19 m.p.h.). Small reductions in city speed limits (say, to 25 m.p.h. from New York’s current default of 30) have little impact on travel times.

There are two surefire ways to reduce speed. One, an American invention, is the speed bump, which costs little and is effective in a blunt, limited way. The other, though still relatively rare in the United States, is ubiquitous elsewhere in the developed world: the speed camera.

Unlike most traffic enforcement, which can feel to the “unlucky” driver like a lottery, cameras work because they are visible and predictable. Install them, and give drivers warning, and speeds will drop. Random enforcement, by contrast, provides a very weak feedback signal — when a strong signal is needed to curb habitual behavior. As Charles Duhigg, a reporter for The Times, notes in “The Power of Habit,” the rewards of a behavior — for example, driving fast without being caught or crashing — determine “how your brain decides whether to remember a habit for the future.”

Speed cameras have also been shown to reduce crash and fatality rates. In 2009, Swedish researchers, looking at camera programs in Europe and Australia, found injury-causing crashes reduced by 16 percent, and fatal crashes cut by an estimated 39 percent.

Research by the University of Minnesota, Public Policy Polling and others has found that a majority of people support speed cameras when they are used in school zones, on roads with a history of crashes or where many drivers violate the speed limit.

The use of cameras does raise legitimate issues about privacy, transparency and accuracy, but similar concerns exist with any form of enforcement. Some critics say the police should focus on “more important” things (even though more people are killed in traffic than in “stranger homicides” in New York City). Others object that speed cameras are just municipal cash cows. What this overlooks is the huge social cost of road crashes; the financial toll alone far exceeds, for example, the economic costs of congestion. Crashes are revenue losers: Speed kills, and you and I pay the bills.

Police unions also object to automated enforcement, perceiving it as a threat to their jobs. But as recent ticket blitzes suggest, the huge numbers of violators netted reveals only how often the police don’t — or can’t — do the very job they fear losing.

In any case, enforcement — whether by cameras or cops — cannot deliver “Vision Zero.” Many motorists routinely drive fast because of the longstanding social norm that speeding does not represent a real crime. Social norms can be effective guides to behavior in situations where we would prefer that the law not intervene. They work in part because people might receive negative social feedback for violating them.

In the dangerous anonymity of traffic, however, there is no social feedback. No one receives a social penalty for aggressive driving, and only rarely a legal penalty.

People are also vastly imperfect judges of risk and safety in traffic. We rightly stigmatize impaired driving, but largely ignore the “sober driver problem,” as a former General Motors researcher, Leonard Evans, recently put it. “If alcohol were eliminated completely,” Mr. Evans wrote, “we would still kill more than 20,000 per year.” The culprit? Speed.

The social norm that drunken driving is not acceptable did not emerge because of advisory signs on the side of the road. It took increasingly severe penalties and decades of social messaging — even systems built into cars to prevent drivers from starting the engine. Despite the toll that D.U.I.s continue to wreak, social feedback was a strong tool for change.

To alter driver behavior on speeding, a city like New York will need more than a catchy slogan, a technical fix or ramped-up enforcement. Enter “psychological traffic calming.”

This approach relies on the suggestive power of context: Drivers tend to go at a speed that feels appropriate for the road they are on. For instance, does your street have a center dividing line? If so, add a few m.p.h. to the average traffic speed. Is it one-way? Add some. Does it have well-marked bike lanes? Cut a few m.p.h. Trees on the side? Drop some.

Ninth Avenue in New York City became safer for all users — drivers, bikers and pedestrians — just by taking a lane away. Drivers pay more attention to these visual messages than whatever advisory signs are present. And drivers seem to learn from other drivers, even in minute ways — one study found that a driver was more likely to signal for a turn at an intersection if the preceding driver had also signaled.

The effect of psychological traffic calming seems contagious and painless. Drivers can be nudged out of their worst instincts.

Context is key: New York City needs to look like a city where driving above 25 m.p.h. seems not simply dangerous, but inappropriate. We will always need a fair way to punish people for doing the wrong thing in traffic, but it may be more productive down the road to encourage them to do the right thing.      

Automated Road Trains  

AUTOMATED “road trains” of lorries travelling only yards apart while under computer control are set to be tested on British roads next year.

Under the plan, so-called platoons of lorries would be electronically linked together, with the driver of the lead vehicle controlling the acceleration, braking and steering of all the vehicles in the convoy. This would allow the vehicles to travel within four to five yards of one another.

Backers of the proposal say that, instead of having to concentrate on the road, the drivers of the lorries not in the lead could use their laptop, read a book or “sit back and enjoy a relaxed lunch”. They also say platoons would cut fuel consumption by about 10% and ease congestion on Britain’s clogged roads.

Motoring organisations have warned, however, that the convoys may intimidate other drivers and block cars from entering and exiting motorways.

Early tests are likely to be held on tracks in the UK, before being extended to quieter parts of the motorway network at night. If successful, further trials would be held on busy roads during the day.

Lorries in an automated convoy would communicate via wi-fi, allowing each to adapt to the speed of the lead vehicle. Infrared cameras and laser sensors are used to monitor the movements of the lead vehicle and those of the other lorries.

A driver is present in each vehicle to take back control in the event of an emergency, and platoons would be able to increase automatically the gaps between them at junctions before drawing closer together again.

Daimler announced last month that it had run an autonomous driving truck on a closed section of the German autobahn, while the Swedish lorry maker Scania has been testing platoons on Swedish roads since 2012.

Officials from the Department for Transport went on a fact-finding trip to Sweden last year. Their study concluded it would be practical to run trials in Britain and ministers are expected to give the go-ahead for them to start next year.

“There are potential benefits, notably reduced costs for haulage firms and reduced congestion for motorists, so there is sense in looking into it,” said a government source. “Equally we have to be cautious and ensure that safety isn’t compromised in any way.”      

Sandbox For Driverless Cars 

A mocked-up set of busy streets in Ann Arbor, Michigan, will provide the sternest test yet for self-driving cars. Complex intersections, confusing lane markings, and busy construction crews will be used to gauge the aptitude of the latest automotive sensors and driving algorithms; mechanical pedestrians will even leap into the road from between parked cars so researchers can see if they trip up onboard safety systems.

The urban setting will be used to create situations that automated driving systems have struggled with, such as subtle driver-pedestrian interactions, unusual road surfaces, tunnels, and tree canopies, which can confuse sensors and obscure GPS signals.

“If you go out on the public streets you come up against rare events that are very challenging for sensors,” says Peter Sweatman, director of the University of Michigan’s Mobility Transformation Center, which is overseeing the project. “Having identified challenging scenarios, we need to re-create them in a highly repeatable way. We don’t want to be just driving around the public roads.”

Google and others have been driving automated cars around public roads for several years, albeit with a human ready to take the wheel if necessary. Most automated vehicles use accurate digital maps and satellite positioning, together with a suite of different sensors, to navigate safely.

Highway driving, which is less complex than city driving, has proved easy enough for self-driving cars, but busy downtown streets—where cars and pedestrians jockey for space and behave in confusing and surprising ways—are more problematic.

“I think it’s a great idea,” says John Leonard, a professor at MIT who led the development of a self-driving vehicle for a challenge run by DARPA in 2007. “It is important for us to try to collect statistically meaningful data about the performance of self-driving cars. Repeated operations—even in a small-scale environment—can yield valuable data sets for testing and evaluating new algorithms.”

The simulation is being built on the edge of the University of Michigan’s campus with funding from the Michigan Department of Transportation and 13 companies involved with developing automated driving technology. It is scheduled to open next spring. It will consist of four miles of roads with 13 different intersections.

Even Google, which has an ambitious vision of vehicle automation, acknowledges that urban driving is a significant challenge. Speaking at an event in California this July, Chris Urmson, who leads the company’s self-driving car project, said several common urban situations remain thorny (see “Urban Jungle a Tough Challenge for Google’s Autonomous Car”). Speaking with MIT Technology Review last month, Urmson gave further details about as-yet-unsolved scenarios (see “Hidden Obstacles for Google’s Self-Driving Cars”).

Such challenges notwithstanding, the first automated cars will go into production shortly. General Motors announced last month that a 2017 Cadillac will be the first car to offer entirely automated driving on highways. It’s not yet clear how the system will work—for example, how it will ensure that the driver isn’t too distracted to take the wheel in an emergency, or under what road conditions it might refuse to take the wheel—but in some situations, the car’s Super Cruise system will take care of steering, braking, and accelerating.

Another technology to be tested in the simulated town is vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The University of Michigan recently concluded a government-funded study in Ann Arbor involving thousands of vehicles equipped with transmitters that broadcast position, direction of travel, speed, and other information to other vehicles and to city infrastructure. The trial showed that vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications could prevent many common accidents by providing advanced warning of a possible collision.

“One of the interesting things, from our point of view, is what extra value you get by combining” automation and car-to-car communications, Sweatman says. “What happens when you put the two together—how much faster can you deploy it?”      

Pedestrian Avoiders 

Ford is giving its cars the ability to spot - and avoid hitting - pedestrians using a combination of radar and camera sensing. The system will appear in Europe next year on Ford’s Mondeo sedan.

Although similar technology is available in some high-end cars, like the Mercedes S-Class, the move from Ford shows how rapidly automation is coming even to modest vehicles. The pedestrian detection that Ford is developing could also prove crucial to fully automated vehicles capable of driving in complex situations—something that remains out of reach.

“It will scan the road for pedestrians and issue a warning [to the driver],” says Scott Lindstrom, manager of driver assist technologies at Ford. “And if the warning isn’t sufficient, it’ll auto-brake.”

Like other automakers, Ford is also experimenting with more complete automation. Its bigger Detroit rival, General Motors, plans to offer a Cadillac by 2017 that can drive automatically on freeways. But Ford’s new system also reflects a more incremental and cautious approach, in contrast to Google, which has committed to delivering full autonomy (see “Driverless Cars are Further Away than You Think”). Google’s latest prototype vehicles originally came without a steering wheel and didn’t feature brakes that were operable by its human passengers, although it was forced to add such controls so it could legally test the cars on the road.

Ford’s pedestrian detection uses two sensors: radar in the bumper and a camera on the windshield. The radar detects an object, and the camera can determine if it is a person crossing the road. It will work at speeds of up to 80 kilometers per hour (50 miles per hour), but Ford said in a release that it will operate only “in daylight and clear weather conditions.”

When the vehicle detects a pedestrian, it will warn the driver with a light and a sound. If the driver does not react immediately, the car will prepare to stop quickly by shortening the distance between the brakes and the brake pads. And if the driver still doesn’t respond, the car will brake.

Ford already offers a range of automated driving technology, including adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning and prevention, and automated parking.      

Artificial Sound For Electric Cars  

(From Brian Dunning's Skeptoid )

For some time now, a few activists have proposed that a danger of electric cars is their silence to unsuspecting pedestrians. According to this claim, pedestrians are more likely to be struck by cars that they cannot hear coming. A suggested solution has been to add artificial noise to electric cars, supposedly making them less dangerous to semi-conscious pedestrians, and definitely making them annoying to everyone else. Having been both a pedestrian and a driver in my life, I am not a fan of this proposal.

Not incidentally, this proposal has existed since long before there were enough electric cars on the road that empirical data could have existed to prove this problem was anything but imaginary.

Wherever the legal responsibility may lie for the safety of pedestrians, the real responsibility is shared between the people who cross streets and parking lots, and the drivers who shouldn’t hit them. As a driver (always of an internal combustion vehicle to date), I have, on many occasions, stomped on the brake to avoid striking someone who stepped out in front of me on a road, or behind me in a parking lot. In not a single instance have I ever elected to continue on a collision course and depended on the pedestrian to note my approach and step out of the way. I suspect this aversion to running people over is not unique to us drivers of fuel burners, but is also found among drivers of electrics. Unfortunately, people do sometimes step into harm’s way by accident.

If you’ve ever stood beside a road, you’ve heard cars approach and drive past. You know that engine noise is almost always inaudible until the car has gone by. The roar of traffic consists entirely of tire and wind noise. Pause at a crosswalk the next time you get a chance and listen: gas-powered cars approach every bit as devoid of engine noise as electrics. Tire noise drowns it out completely. A pedestrian who steps into a street of fast-moving traffic had better rely on his eyes as well as his ears. Looking both ways before crossing is the pedestrian’s best shot at upholding his half of the responsibility.

But sometimes he’s paying more attention to his iPhone than to traffic and he’s not being responsible. SHould we let the Darwin Effect preside? Nay, say all reasonable pundits. Let’s put speakers blaring electronic engine noise onto the front of some cars. But which cars? All electric cars, regardless of the sound output of their tires, or cars that approach quietly? By no means are these to sets of cars the same. A pedestrian-smearing 600 class Mercedes-Benz comes a lot quieter than you might think.

There are environments where electric cars are nearly always quieter than internal combustion, and where pedestrians abound: the slow-speed worlds of parking lots. Here, tire noise (which generally increases exponentially to vehicle speed) is usually below the threshold of engine noise. Here it might make sense for all cars, in both forward and reverse, to emit a minimum required noise level. Such a law that applies to all cars would be far more sensible than “All electric cars should emit fake engine noise, at all times, regardless of all other factors.” The question then becomes whether anyone would vote for such a comprehensively fair law. It’s one thing to demand that those damn electric-car-driving hippies should have noisemakers affixed to their cars, and quite another to be told that you must also affix one to your Cadillac, and also that you must be exposed to a sea of cacophony in every supermarket parking lot.

I am not convinced that any such law would create a statistically significant reduction in pedestrian casualties. People have always been hit by cars, even before they had phone screens to distract them from looking, and before they had headphones to distract them from hearing. Drivers also have similar new distractions, but fake-noise generators would not impact driver attentiveness (though other systems can). Fake engine noise is (or should be) doomed to failure because it’s based on a misguided understanding of the ways approaching cars produce noise.

Enjoy the silence inside your electric ride (or your gas-powered Toyota, for that matter). And please continue not running over people.

See also Harry Harrison SS Speed of the Cheetah, Roar of the Lion      

Google Image Recognition 

Researchers at Google have created software that can use complete sentences to accurately describe scenes shown in photos—a significant advance in the field of computer vision. When shown a photo of a game of ultimate Frisbee, for example, the software responded with the description “A group of young people playing a game of frisbee.” The software can even count, giving answers such as “Two pizzas sitting on top of a stove top oven.”

Previously, most efforts to create software that understands images have focused on the easier task of identifying single objects.

“It’s very exciting,” says Oriol Vinyals, a research scientist at Google. “I’m sure there are going to be some potential applications coming out of this.”

The new software is the latest product of Google’s research into using large collections of simulated neurons to process data (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning”). No one at Google programmed the new software with rules for how to interpret scenes. Instead, its networks “learned” by consuming data. Though it’s just a research project for now, Vinyals says, he and others at Google have already begun to think about how it could be used to enhance image search or help the visually impaired navigate online or in the real world.

Google’s researchers created the software through a kind of digital brain surgery, plugging together two neural networks developed separately for different tasks. One network had been trained to process images into a mathematical representation of their contents, in preparation for identifying objects. The other had been trained to generate full English sentences as part of automated translation software.

When the networks are combined, the first can “look” at an image and then feed the mathematical description of what it “sees” into the second, which uses that information to generate a human-readable sentence. The combined network was trained to generate more accurate descriptions by showing it tens of thousands of images with descriptions written by humans. “We’re seeing through language what it thought the image was,” says Vinyals.

After that training process, the software was set loose on several large data sets of images from Flickr and other sources and asked to describe them. The accuracy of its descriptions was then judged with an automated test used to benchmark computer-vision software. Google’s software posted scores in the 60s on a 100-point scale. Humans doing the test typically score in 70s, says Vinyals.

That result suggests Google is far ahead of other researchers working to create scene-describing software. Stanford researchers recently published details of their own system and reported that it scored between 40 and 50 on the same standard test.

However, Vinyals notes that researchers at Google and elsewhere are still in the early stages of understanding how to create and test this kind of software. When Google asked humans to rate its software’s descriptions of images on a scale of 1 to 4, it averaged only 2.5, suggesting that it still has a long way to go.

Vinyals predicts that research on understanding and describing scenes will now intensify. One problem that could slow things down: though large databases of hand-labeled images have been created to train software to recognize individual objects, there are fewer labeled photos of more natural scenes.

Microsoft this year launched a database called COCO to try to fix that. Google used COCO in its new research, but it is still relatively small. “I hope other parties will chip in and make it better,” says Vinyals.      

Connected Cars  

Some 3,000 drivers in Ann Arbor, Michigan, have had wireless internet connections fitted to their cars. These are used to feed information to and from other vehicles and the transport infrastructure. The system will, for instance, warn a driver about to overtake a car if there is a chance of a collision with an oncoming vehicle, or change a traffic light to green if safe to do so. The number of vehicles involved in the project, run by the University of Michigan and largely funded by America’s Department of Transportation, could triple over the next few years.

What is happening in Michigan is part of a much broader trend: the rise of the “connected” car. This is the coming together of communications technologies, information systems and safety devices to provide vehicles with an increasing level of sophistication and automation. It is a process that will change not just how cars are used but also the relationship between a car and its driver. This, in turn, will affect the way vehicles are made and sold. Eventually, it is the connected car that may deliver a driverless future.

The kit that enables this is starting to appear in new vehicles. Some of the most advanced driver aids can be specified in certain Mercedes-Benz models. These cars are already capable of doing a fair bit of autonomous driving. For instance, the German company’s new “Intelligent Drive” package has a feature which, in congested traffic moving at less than 60kph (37mph), allows the driver to let the car steer, brake and accelerate by itself. The system uses a combination of ultrasonic and radar sensors along with cameras that monitor all around the vehicle. Because Mercedes drivers like to be comfortable, it will even automatically adjust the suspension before the car hits a pothole in the road.

Many features in modern cars are becoming accessible to smartphones that connect to the vehicle. A smartphone app allows the driver of an electric BMW i3, for example, to check the battery capacity of his vehicle while it is being topped up at a recharging station. Audi, part of the Volkswagen group, is working on a system which would allow a driver to get out of the car and use his smartphone to instruct the vehicle to park itself.

Connected cars are a marriage of two types of mobile technology: the mechanical sort, which revolutionised transport in the 20th century, and the electronic variety, which has transformed telecoms in the 21st. A recent report by analysts at Citigroup, a bank, used data from IHS, a research firm, to divide the ways that mobile telecoms are influencing motoring into three useful groups.

The car app

The first bunch is made up of services and applications delivered via mobile networks to a car - either to systems that are part of the vehicle or to devices, such as smartphones or tablets, carried by the driver or passengers and connected to the car wirelessly or with a cable. The most obvious example are “infotainment” systems, which stream music, video, satellite navigation and traffic information. The second consists of services based on data supplied from the car, such as advance warning that a part needs to be replaced. And the third category brings together multiple vehicles, communicating with each other and with smart infrastructure, from roadside sensors to traffic signals and remote data centres, to make traffic flow more smoothly and safely.

Broadly speaking, services in the first group are the most widespread already. “The cards in infotainment have been dealt,” says Andreas Mai of Cisco, a network-equipment giant. People already have their favourite services, like iTunes, Spotify or TripAdvisor, on their smartphones. Surveys, though, suggest that car buyers place a higher value on services that make travelling safer, save them time or money, or alert them to problems with their vehicle. These services lie mainly though not wholly in the second and third groups. But widespread availability may take several years.

The number of cars with some sort of networking ability today is small, perhaps only 8% of the global total, according to McKinsey, a consulting firm. But by 2020 around a quarter of all cars, mainly the more expensive sort, will be online. The build-up will be relatively slow because many old cars stay on the road for a decade or so. But for new cars things are changing rapidly. BMW has been embedding SIM cards for mobile connectivity in all its new cars since April. By 2020, around 90% of all manufacturers’ new models are likely to have them, according to Machina Research, another consulting firm. The market then starts to look particularly juicy. A recent report by GSMA, the mobile operators’ trade body, says revenues from the sale of in-vehicle services, hardware and the provision of connectivity itself will treble over five years to reach $39 billion by 2018. Machina reckons it could rise to a staggering $422 billion by 2022, most of it coming from connected services to and from vehicles.

Car buyers are expected to be keen on connected services once they get to know about them and see them in action. This much is clear from the limited offerings already available. The ability for the car itself to call the emergency services automatically in the event of an accident is reckoned by many drivers to be a valuable feature of GM’s OnStar, a connected safety and navigation system which in effect enables a vehicle to function as a phone. A separate app also allows OnStar users to lock and unlock the car’s doors remotely, start the engine and find the vehicle on a map if the driver forgets where he parked it. GM aims to have the service available in nearly all its cars worldwide by 2015.

But regulators are also forcing the pace. The European Union wants a system that automatically calls for help in the event of a crash to be fitted to all new vehicles by 2015. Russia has similar plans and Brazilian cars will need to be fitted with trackers as a way to reduce theft. Encouraged by the Ann Arbor test, in February America’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it would begin working on a regulation to require vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication to be fitted in all new cars.

On the digital dashboard

Different applications require different technologies. A search for a parking space would probably go over public mobile networks from an app, whether on the driver’s smartphone or one running on a digital dashboard. For safety features, such as preventing a car from pulling out in front of another, V2V communication is essential, says Kurt Sievers of NXP, a semiconductor company. Public networks will be too slow for this and may lack the capacity. His company is making systems with dual antennae to cope with reception difficulties, because radio waves from moving vehicles tend to bounce off buildings and other surfaces. Authentication of signals matters too, to prevent cars taking unnecessary avoiding action.

With increased connectivity between cars, driver aids will become much more sophisticated. A connected car would, for instance, receive not just information about a hazard detected by its own sensors, but also alerts from a vehicle farther along the road or around a blind corner.

Connectivity can also help provide more real-time information about traffic hold-ups, beyond that already provided by satellite-navigation devices. The addition of vehicle-to-infrastructure communication (V2I) takes things further still. Whereas the connected cars in Ann Arbor can change the timing of traffic lights, a combination of V2V, V2I and automated driving could do away with traffic lights completely. Cars could be co-ordinated so that they avoid one another at road crossings. Not having to stop at road crossings would reduce congestion.

The sensors in vehicles that check things like tyre and oil pressures, as well as brakes and engine performance, will also have a role. Pavan Mathew of Telefónica, a mobile-network operator, points out that many drivers dread the moment when a dashboard warning light flicks on. Remote monitoring and messaging can swiftly send a note to the driver about the extent of the problem.

Vehicles’ diagnostic systems could also pick up faults before they are manifested as black smoke pouring from an exhaust pipe or a horrible grinding noise from the engine. Cars could then be brought in for repair before trivial problems develop into big ones. Following the lead of Tesla, a Californian maker of electric cars, more faults might one day be fixed remotely over the internet by a software upgrade.

Indeed, checking on cars remotely has plenty of other possibilities that may reduce (or worsen) stress levels. Online services will allow, for instance, closer monitoring of the driving behaviour of teenagers beyond the basic warnings of aggressive braking or exceeding speed limits that the “black boxes” supplied by some insurance companies presently provide. And not just younger drivers. Insurers are likely to offer any driver a lower premium if technological monitoring of his driving habits shows he is being careful.

Exactly who will deliver all these new motoring services is far from clear. It is by no means certain that it will be traditional carmakers, even though they are all busily developing, making and marketing increasingly connected vehicles. In the past consumers have expected the new technologies that appear in cars quickly to become standard features for which they pay little if anything extra. Electric windows, anti-lock brakes and power steering are now almost universal.

The connected car, however, has created powerful new competitors in the motor industry’s traditional supply chain. And some of those new competitors are keen to win themselves a big slice of the action. These are mobile-telecoms operators, makers of networking gear, developers of V2V and V2I technologies, producers of consumer hardware and systems, software firms and creators of mobile apps.

Cars will become bundles of different technologies, not only of devices but also of consumer brands, all vying for the driver’s attention in a sometimes uneasy alliance with carmakers. Apple and Google are locked in competition for control of the digital dashboard. In response to CarPlay, a vehicle-infotainment system developed by Apple, Google in June launched a rival called Android Auto.

Mobile-phone operators see the connected car as yet another device to be hooked up to their networks. In America, AT&T is letting drivers of GM cars add their vehicles to their data plans, alongside their smartphones and tablets, for $10 a month. In future, which mobile network you use may affect your choice of car. In a recent poll Nielsen, a market-research firm, found that half of Americans who owned cars made since 2009 would be less likely to buy a new car if it had a different data plan from their smartphone.

Invisible competitors

Not everyone trying to get in on the act will be visible to the driver. All the data going to and from cars and infrastructure will have to be transmitted and processed. That adds to demand for chips, network equipment and data centres. Cisco, for example, envisages a lot of processing taking place not in the “cloud” of central data centres but more speedily and conveniently within a “fog” of intelligent networks.

Carmakers know they will have to share the benefits of the connected car. Some seem gloomy about their prospects of getting any of them at all. Fiat Chrysler’s boss, Sergio Marchionne, is worried that it will cost his company money to “provide a venue to host other people’s parties”. Some carmakers see more of an opportunity to profit as they could benefit beyond their share of the monthly charges for connectivity. Using the data to tweak the design and performance of their vehicles by identifying components that are more likely to cause problems will both help them to improve the cars they produce and cut warranty costs. Good connectivity should help to reinforce brand loyalty too.

The relationship between carmakers and their customers is at arm’s length at present, operating through a dealership system that is reminiscent of that between handset-makers and operators. After selling a car through a franchised dealer, further interaction with car buyers is limited to a dealership visit every couple of years for a service (or sooner if there is a problem). Connectivity will bring the customer and carmaker closer together. Ship and forget will be supplanted by ship and update, which is what makers of computers and mobile devices do already. So far car companies seem unclear about what this will mean for how they do business.

Getting closer to their customers should at least make the carmakers more responsive. The data can help manufacturers and dealers target customers more efficiently. As well as sending details of offers, dealers might better fit a particular car to a driver through an analysis of individual driving habits. They could suggest extra features that would suit some motorists, from hybrid technology to modest add-ons. Some carmakers are already miles along this road. Elon Musk, Tesla’s boss, laughs at the suggestion that his customers would accept anything less than a high degree of connectivity and interaction when he sells them an electric car.

The data could help customers know more about cars too. Motorists will have the ability to find out the actual miles per gallon a car will do in the real world rather than trust the claims made by car companies, which use a box of tricks to make their vehicles unrealistically frugal during tests.

Carmakers, usually conservative and slow-moving, are getting ready. Aside from the engine, body and interior, cars already contain lots of electrical architecture. Most of the big firms have set up connected-car groups to work alongside their electrical engineers to ensure that the hardware and software required for connectivity fit. Detroit’s car guys are deferring to techies, poached from the software industry, who are adept at dealing with app-makers and the like. Carmakers are looking closely at Tesla, which describes itself as a “software company that builds cars”, for inspiration.

Connectivity will eventually change the way cars are integrated into transport systems. Car sharing, either through car clubs run by the big rental firms or peer-to-peer services, will be far easier when communication between vehicles and potential passengers is seamless and any car can be accessed and operated securely by any smartphone. Making journeys using several forms of transport, including a car, will be smoother if it is easier to find car-sharing locations or parking spaces close to connecting points for trains or buses.

And with increasing automation and connectivity there will be less need to have to own or drive these vehicles yourself. Today’s experimental autonomous cars stuffed full of on-board sensors are only part of the solution. The development of systems that let cars talk to cars, and to the world beyond, will be just as important on the road to a driverless future.      

Singapore Driverless Cars Trial 2015  

As driverless cars edge slowly toward commercial reality, some people are wondering how cities might change as a result. Will traffic lights disappear? Will parking garages become obsolete? Will carpooling become the norm?

Singapore is keen to find out. The city-state will open one of its neighborhoods to driverless cars in 2015, with the idea that such vehicles could operate as a kind of jitney service, picking up passengers and taking them to trains or other modes of public transportation. The vehicles might be like golf carts, taking people short distances at low speeds, similar to the driverless vehicles demonstrated this year by Google (see “Lazy Humans Shaped Google’s New Autonomous Car”).

Lam Wee Shann, director of the futures division for Singapore’s Ministry of Transport, said during a panel held at MIT last month that the government wants to explore whether autonomous vehicles could reduce congestion and remake the city into one built around walking, bicycling, and public transit.

“Singapore welcomes industry and academia to deploy automated vehicles for testing under real traffic conditions on public roads,” Lam said in a follow-up e-mail interview. He declined to say whether Google or any other companies pursuing driverless cars have contacted Singapore yet.

At 700 square kilometers, Singapore is about three times the size of Boston, but it has 5.5 million residents versus Boston’s 646,000. Because it is so dense, Singapore is aggressively trying to discourage car traffic. For example, if you want to own a car in Singapore you have to pay a “certificate of entitlement” fee that’s roughly equal to the price of a car. It also offers free travel on city trains before peak periods (along with free breakfast vouchers).

Through the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, the city has had pilot tests of driverless cars for several years, starting with two driverless golf carts on the campus of the National University of Singapore. This year it added a Mitsubishi i-MiEV electric car, retrofitted to be autonomous. A driverless bus called the Navia is used as a shuttle at Singapore’s Cleantech eco-industrial park and on campus at Nanyang Technology University.

All of these experiments “provide first-and-last mile connectivity to main public transport nodes,” Lam said.

This fall, people in Singapore were able to try out driverless cars for the first time. Driverless buggies were deployed in the Chinese and Japanese gardens in the Jurong Lake District. The system featured an online booking system and vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The buggies ran for two weekends, and carried 500 people over 400 kilometers in total.

Cities with driverless cars could eventually eliminate mainstays like traffic lights. Paolo Santi, a senior researcher with the MIT/Fraunhofer ambient mobility initiative, said at the MIT event that his lab has done simulations showing that twice as many driverless cars could route themselves through intersections, easing congestion and reducing the greenhouse gas emissions caused by stop-and-go driving. Santi hopes to carry out experiments in Singapore to see how pedestrians and bikes affect driverless cars at intersections.

Many challenges remain. On the panel at MIT, Nhai Cao, a senior global product line manager at TomTom, a navigation vendor, noted that, “current maps are not good enough for autonomous vehicles.” Driverless cars, he said, need maps that are three-dimensional and accurate to within 20 centimeters.

Lam also noted that if driverless cars are available to everyone, that could translate into more people taking car trips. “An autonomous vehicle could add on a lot more road trips, and we can ill afford that,” he said.      

The Italian Job  

FOR years fans of The Italian Job have puzzled over the fate of the red Lamborghini Miura that exploded in a fireball in the film’s opening sequence before being pushed by off an Alpine cliff by the mafia.




Iain Tyrrell bought the Miura after a meeting in a Paris car park

In reality, a worthless double was used for the crash, but for the next 46 years there was no confirmed sighting of the vehicle, even though the Miura is regarded as the first supercar of the modern era.

Now a businessman in Cheshire has paid more than £1m for the original Lamborghini after discovering it in near perfect condition — and still capable of 170mph. Iain Tyrrell, 51, who fell in love with the car when he saw the 1969 film at the age of five, was tipped off about the vehicle in March last year. He was then invited to view it in an underground car park in Paris between Christmas and the new year.

Tyrrell agreed on the spot to buy the Miura from its French owner and took it to the workshop at Cheshire Classic Cars in Chester in January. He authenticated it with the help of specialists at Octane magazine, which will publish full details of the car in its March 25 issue. A series of Italian collectors, including the Ferretti yacht-building family, have left the car with fewer than 12,000 miles on the clock.

Tyrrell, who restored the Rolls-Royce used by Winston Churchill and General Dwight D Eisenhower in the run-up to D-Day, intends to put the car on public display. He says he and its co-owner, Keith Ashworth, are not aiming to make “a fast buck” but said: “I do expect an overseas buyer will try to bid for it.”      

Parking Fines  

One of the UK’s leading experts on parking enforcement has been quietly pioneering a scheme that could put a severe dent in the finances of the private parking industry. The scheme, devised by Ron Clark, the Staffordshire-based campaigner, offers motorists the prospect of freedom from being pursued by private parking companies for “penalties” incurred by overstaying their allotted time in car parks. At the moment millions of motorists each year are faced with demands running as high as £100 for exceeding their time limit by even a few minutes.

Since its launch in 2007 Mr Clark’s initiative has remained largely below most motorists’ radar, but the huge growth in private parking companies in the past couple of years could fuel a huge increase in demand for his services.

The scheme works like this. A motorist contacts fair-parking.co.uk, Mr Clark’s website, which, in exchange for a payment of £18 for two years, gives permission for his home address to be used as the motorist’s contact address. The driver concerned then sends off their vehicle registration document (V5) to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, substituting Mr Clark’s address for the old address.

Private parking companies depend on this address to identify and chase motorists for payment of parking “penalties”. They contact the DVLA with the number plates of “offending” vehicles and the DVLA gives out the names and addresses of the registered keepers.

The companies would normally use this data to contact motorists at their home addresses with demands for money, but Mr Clark’s scheme puts a buffer between the two. Mr Clark says: “When I receive a letter for one of my scheme members from a parking company I read it but would not pass it on except in very exceptional cases. This means that the vast majority of members never receive any demands from parking companies.”

To those who might question whether such a scheme is legal, Mr Clark says: “Before I started back in 2007 I checked this out with the DVLA and they had no objection. At the time it was a very small operation but as it grew bigger it came to the attention of the private parking companies, who complained to the DVLA about me in 2011. The DVLA declined to take any action.”

Mr Clark adds: “What all this means is that if you park at a supermarket, retail park, station car park or council car park you can have peace of mind that you will not be contacted at your home by people demanding payment for alleged parking penalties.”

The DVLA initially denied but then admitted it had discussed the use of correspondence addresses with the British Parking Association. It says it has no record of any talks with Mr Clark. A spokesman says: “The general requirement to provide an address on the registration certificate (V5C) is prescribed in law. We take a view that the address provided should be one at which a person can be contacted. For most people we believe this would be their home address.”

The British Parking Association, the leading trade body for the industry, says: “We do know of Ron Clark and have objected to the DVLA about the use of a contact address to register a vehicle in the UK. The DVLA says it registers vehicles in accordance with the Vehicle Registration Acts and believes this allows for contact addresses. We believe that if this is the case the law should be changed as no vehicle should be registered anonymously.”

Rhys Williams, a partner at Taylor Vinters, the international law firm, says: “This is a complicated area but I think Mr Clark may have spotted a gap in the legislation. The vehicle registration document [form V5] requires the vehicle’s owner to provide a name and address but does not specify that it must be a primary residence, or even a residence at all. The point is that the DVLA needs a valid contact address for drivers, rather than a home address.

“The DVLA clearly has a vital role to play in assisting the police in investigating criminal and quasicriminal motoring offences. As such, it requires a valid contact address to be able to pass on to the police. Presumably Mr Clark immediately forwards speeding tickets and the like on to the correct address. The police would presumably take a very dim view of not being able to serve notice of a criminal offence on an individual. Equally, however, it is quite a leap to suggest that the DVLA should involve itself in private disputes between landowners and drivers.”

Mr Clark confirms that he would pass on letters in cases where the police needed to contact a motorist in connection with a criminal offence, such as speeding, or where someone was flagrantly abusing the scheme. The motorist’s scheme membership would also be terminated. This has only happened about half a dozen times since his service started.

He denies his scheme might tempt motorists to flout parking regulations with impunity. He says: “This is emphatically not a cowboys’ charter. I take action where a scheme member has been behaving badly, but such people are only a tiny fraction of the total. The vast majority of my members are law-abiding citizens who object to paying as much as £85 to £100 for overstaying their parking time by as little as 10 minutes or parking slightly incorrectly.”      

Incompetent Drivers 

One woman thought her car had an “expanding petrol tank” because her fuel bill was rising. Another who complained that her car was burning too much fuel on the motorway did not realise that she had been in second gear for 100 miles.

Then there was the man who thought the tyre pressure needed checking when in fact the warning light was flashing because he was driving with the handbrake on. Whether it is the rules of the road or the basics of car maintenance, a survey of 2,000 drivers in Britain reveals an alarming degree of ignorance.

One in ten drivers did not realise that they had to inflate their tyres with air and 21 per cent did not know which side of the car their petrol cap was on. One driver was under the impression that you could not drive on the motorway until you were 30 years of age. One in 20 were unaware that they had to fill up the screen wash. Some of those who did at least try to perform that routine task confessed that they put the liquid in the oil tank instead. Others mistook air freshener for deicer; almost one in four had driven the wrong way up a one-way street; and a quarter admitted filling up their tank with the wrong fuel.

The survey by the car retailer Evans Halshaw also revealed that 15 per cent of motorists have no idea how to open their car bonnet. When shown the symbol for the handbrake warning light, 20 per cent either said they did not know what it meant or guessed incorrectly; 40 per cent could not identify the engine coolant dashboard symbol; and 18 per cent did not know what the term “bald tyres” meant.

A third of motorists said that they regularly drove around roundabouts twice because they were lost. More than half of those questioned did not know what MOT stood for and nearly one in ten did not know that cars older than three years needed one every year.

A spokesman for Evans Halshaw said: “Some of the misdemeanours drivers are guilty of are things we can all relate to, but the lack of knowledge when it comes to basic vehicle maintenance can be vastly improved.

“The longer you have been driving, the easier it is to forget basic rules and many drivers do become complacent over time.”

Leaving the handbrake on while driving was the most common failing, while mounting a kerb, running out of fuel mid-journey and turning the windscreen wipers on instead of the lights were other common mistakes that motorists admitted to.      

You Are What You Drive  

A recent survey has found that drivers are judging their fellow motorists based on the type of cars they drive.

The survey, conducted by Continental, found that as many as 45 per cent of the 2,000 driver surveyed admitted to changing the way they react to different types of both drivers and cars.

Results show that 27 per cent of drivers will also be knowingly more considerate to drivers of the same make and model as the car that they themselves own.

At the top of the list was irritation caused by drivers using their mobile phones whilst waiting in traffic or at lights, whilst 6 in 10 drivers become annoyed when they see a car with a rival sports team's sticker on.

A spokesman for Continental Tyres, Mark Griffiths, told BT: "It is alarming that 34% of drivers will change their driving style based on a prejudice about something as unimportant as how clean a vehicle is."

He went on to add: "We might form opinions of people based on issues like appearance, though for that to lead to more aggressive driving is dangerous. We think road users must be courteous to others at all times."

1 in 3 drivers was found to make room for drivers of hybrid or electric cars, but in contrast an equal number will block them for being 'self-righteous'.

Mr Griffiths finished by saying: "Rather than aesthetic and other non-risk affecting features, the importance should be placed on factors like driving behaviour, car safety and driving condition – these are the things that really have an impact on safety."

Manufacturers Cheating On Emissions Tests? 

EUROPE’S car makers have been accused of cheating tests designed to cut air pollution. The manufacturers have allegedly programmed their vehicles to spot when they are in test conditions so they can switch on systems that temporarily lower the emission of toxic gases.

Tests on cars made by six different companies show they emit up to 9½ times more toxic nitrogen dioxide (NO2) on the road than they do in lab-based emissions tests. Last week the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) accused Volkswagen of secretly installing illegal “defeat devices” into its cars to switch on the systems that remove pollutants from exhaust fumes when they are being tested, and switch them off once the test is over.

The EPA ordered VW, which admitted the offence, to recall almost 500,000 diesels including its Jetta, Beetle, Golf and Passat models, as well as the Audi A3, which is made by Volkswagen Group. This weekend Transport and Environment (T&E), a Brussels-based research organisation, said its data suggested the same trick was being used in Europe and could involve other manufacturers too. In the EU new diesel models must pass tests showing the cars emit no more than 80 milligrams of NO2 per kilometre. T&E’s data shows, however, that vehicles from VW, Audi, Citroën, Vauxhall, BMW and Mercedes-Benz emitted on average four times more than the legal limit on the road — even though they had all passed the EU tests. The worst models were up to 9½ times over the legal NO2 limit.

Such discrepancies had been blamed on the test regime failing to replicate road driving, but Greg Archer, of T&E, said road emissions were too far above the legal limit for such an explanation. He called on Britain’s Vehicle Certification Agency and the European Commission to investigate whether VW and others were using similar systems on EU cars.

“The gap between the legal limit and the pollutants actually emitted is so great that it suggests cars’ electronic control units have been programmed to detect when a test is under way and cut emissions til it is over,” said Archer. Most emissions reduction systems work by releasing urea into exhaust fumes to mop up NO2 , but having them on all the time would mean drivers must keep refilling the urea bottle and performance would fall.

Mike Hawes, chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, said there was “no evidence“that makers cheat the EU’s system. “Test vehicles are removed from the production line randomly and must be standard production models, certified by the relevant authority. “The industry acknowledges the test method is outdated and is seeking agreement from the European Commission for a new test that is more representative of on-road conditions.”      

Comparative Cost of Driving

Britons planning a move to Russia or India may be daunted by the prospect of Siberian winters or chaotic traffic in sweltering heat. But new data showing the cost of buying and running a car in the UK compared with 10 other countries, highlights the two for cheap motoring.

The survey works out the cost of buying a new or secondhand car plus the first year’s running costs, such as fuel and insurance, so it’s a good guide to how much an expat will need to spend to get mobile.

Back home in the UK, these costs total £18,901, of which £17,000 is the average price of a new hatchback such as a VW GolfTrendLine 1.4 or its equivalent. On top of that is unleaded fuel at £1,154 (assuming 6,000 annual mileage at the US average of 24.1 mpg) where the fuel costs £1.02 per litre. Added to this is an average insurance cost of £747.

Comparable totals for Russia and India are only £11,605 and £8,768 – in Russia the new car costs £11,195 and in India £7,813.

If a driver opted for the home produced Lada in Russia the new wheels cost a mere £2,682. In India, the local Tata Nano costs £2,057, little more than the price of an old banger in the UK. Russian petrol is about 33p per litre, while the average unleaded price is 65p per litre in India.

The USA appears to top the expense table according to the research from Carfinance247, an online car finance broker. However, that is mainly because of the initial car cost in America where a VW hatchback costs the equivalent of £23,283, about a third more than in the UK.

However, air conditioning and automatic transmission tend to be standard in the USA while big cars and SUVs are usually better value than compact cars in comparison to the UK. The fuel is also cheap, at about 30p per litre for unleaded.

In Brazil, a new small hatchback costs £12,362 while unleaded petrol costs 65p per litre. However, there are hidden costs, according to Brian Hazlehurst, a writer and translator who lives in Rio de Janeiro.

“Insurance is very expensive, due to high crime levels in certain areas, while road tolls often cost more than fuel. But they do result in better maintained highways,” he said.

South Africa and Australia, popular destinations for expats, are easy on the motorist’s pocket. In South Africa, the new car costs £10,460, while fuel is about 51p per litre for unleaded. Comparable costs for Australia are £12,227 and 58p per litre.

Meanwhile, the UAE’s reputation as a paradise for motorists is borne out by the research. The new hatchback costs £14,360, while unleaded fuel is a treat at only 30p per litre.

Annabel Kantaria, an expat in Dubai, said: “It cost me £10 to fill a Land Rover LR4 with super high octane petrol yesterday thanks to low fuel prices, but this will go up if and when the price of oil rises.

"Many Western expats find they have more disposable income here than they might have at home and, with the price of cars and fuel currently lower than in their home countries, are able to buy and run higher performance cars than they might own back home.'

Driving in Germany and Japan is only slightly cheaper than in UK, judging by the figures. The VW TrendLine costs about £14,271 in Germany and £15,636 in Japan while unleaded fuel costs about 97p per litre in Germany and 77p in Japan.

The survey does not include Singapore, perhaps the priciest territory for motorists. Rosie Milne, who lives there, said: “Before you can run a car you need a certificate of entitlement. You can’t buy any new car for less than £40,000 and the weekly petrol bill for our Nissan Qashqai is the equivalent of £55, even though it is mainly used on short journeys, while insurance costs about £360 and maintenance, servicing and parts another £550.”

The data was gathered by Mediaworks, a marketing agency, on behalf of Carfinance247, drawing on 70 different sources including petrol price listings, car sales websites, car buying guides, travel guides and news reports. The figures exclude taxes and costs in sterling were calculated on exchange rates with local currencies in January 2016.

AVs and Social Control

A NEW kind of vehicle is taking to the roads, and people are not sure what to make of it. Is it safe? How will it get along with other road users? Will it really shake up the way we travel? These questions are being asked today about autonomous vehicles (AVs). Exactly the same questions were posed when the first motor cars rumbled onto the roads. By granting drivers unprecedented freedom, automobiles changed the world. They also led to unforeseen harm, from strip malls and urban sprawl to road rage and climate change. Now AVs are poised to rewrite the rules of transport—and there is a danger that the same mistake will be made all over again.

AVs are on the threshold of being able to drive, without human supervision, within limited and carefully mapped areas (see special report). Waymo, the self-driving-car unit of Google’s parent company, hopes to launch an autonomous “robotaxi” service in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona later this year. General Motors, America’s biggest carmaker, plans its own robotaxi service for 2019. On February 26th California said it would abolish the rule that experimental AVs must always have a safety driver on board ready to assume control.

Clean, dream machines

Assuming the technology can be made to work as AV firms expect, it is not hard to imagine the beginnings of the driverless era. Cost means that self-driving vehicles will at first serve as robotaxis, summoned using a ride-hailing app. That way they get used more, offsetting their costs, and provide transport that is cheaper per mile than owning a car, undermining the case for car ownership, at least for townies. UBS, a bank, reckons that urban car ownership will fall by 70% by 2050. Today’s cars sit unused 95% of the time, so a widespread switch to robotaxis would let urban land wasted on parking be reallocated.

AVs would dramatically reduce the number of road deaths and, being electric, cut harmful emissions in places with clean grids. Clever routing, closer spacing between vehicles and dynamic congestion-charging could cut traffic. Like cars before them, AVs will reshape cities (a long commute is easier if you work or sleep en route) and redefine retailing (shops can come to you). Carmakers will face enormous change; instead of selling to individuals, they will supply fleet operators, or reinvent themselves as “mobility service” providers.

Economists and urban planners should rejoice because AVs mean that, for the first time, the unwelcome externalities associated with cars can be fully priced in. In particular, dynamic road-tolling and congestion charging, adjusting the cost per kilometre according to the time of day, level of traffic, length of trip and so on, will allow fine-tuning of entire urban-transport systems. By setting taxes and tolls accordingly, planners can subsidise rides in poor districts, for example, or encourage people to use public transport for longer trips. They can also ensure that the roads do not end up full of empty vehicles looking for riders. Such granular road-pricing is the logical conclusion of existing schemes. Some cities already have congestion-charging regimes, subsidise ride-hailing in poor areas ill-served by public transport, or impose per-ride taxes on Uber, Lyft and their kind.

Yet the same tolling schemes that will let city planners minimise congestion or subsidise robotaxi services in underserved “transport deserts” have a darker side—and one to which too little attention has been paid. AVs will offer an extraordinarily subtle policy tool which can, in theory, be used to transform cities; but in the hands of authoritarian governments could also become a powerful means of social control.

Panopticons on wheels

For a start, AVs will record everything that happens in and around them. When a crime is committed, the police will ask nearby cars if they saw anything. Fleet operators will know a great deal about their riders. In one infamous analysis of passenger data, Uber identified one-night stands. If, as seems likely, human-driven cars are gradually banned on safety grounds, passengers could lose the freedom to go anywhere they choose. The risk that not all robotaxis will serve all destinations could open the door to segregation and discrimination. In authoritarian countries, robotaxis could restrict people’s movements. If all this sounds implausible, recall that Robert Moses notoriously designed the Southern State Parkway, linking New York City to Long Island’s beaches, with low bridges to favour access by rich whites in cars, while discriminating against poor blacks in buses. And China’s “social credit” system, which awards points based on people’s behaviour, already restricts train travel for those who step out of line.

So as robotaxi services roll out this year, and expand to cover wider areas in more cities in the years to come, there is more to think about than technology and transport policy. Experiments with different pricing schemes, decisions about whether to ban private vehicles from city centres, and license auctions for competing private robotaxi operators sound harmless enough. But collectively they represent a seismic shift for society. Autonomous vehicles offer passengers freedom from accidents, pollution, congestion and the bother of trying to find a parking space. But they will require other freedoms to be given up in return—especially the ability to drive your own vehicle anywhere. Choices about who can go where, when and how are inescapably political in nature.

A century ago cars were seized upon as a solution to the drawbacks of horses, which were clogging city streets with manure. The broader social consequences of cars, both good and bad, were entirely unforeseen. Today the danger is that AVs will be treated merely as a technological solution to the problems associated with cars and that, once again, the wider impacts will be overlooked. AVs have the potential to transform physical transport as radically as packet-switching transformed the delivery of data. But as with the internet, realising their benefits is a matter of politics as well as technology. AVs offer a chance to forge a new and better trade-off between personal mobility and social impact—but only if the lesson of the horseless carriage is applied to the era of the driverless car.

AVs as of 2022

“I would be shocked if we do not achieve full self-driving safer than a human this year,” said Tesla chief executive, Elon Musk, in January. For anyone who follows Musk’s commentary, this might sound familiar. In 2020, he promised autonomous cars the same year, saying: “There are no fundamental challenges.” In 2019, he promised Teslas would be able to drive themselves by 2020 – converting into a fleet of 1m “robotaxis”. He has made similar predictions every year going back to 2014.

From late 2020, Tesla expanded beta trials of its “Full Self-Driving” software (FSD) to about 60,000 Tesla owners, who must pass a safety test and pay $12,000 for the privilege. The customers will pilot the automated driver assistance technology, helping to refine it before a general release.

With the beta rollout, Tesla is following the playbook of software companies, “where the idea is you get people to iron out the kinks”, says Andrew Maynard, director of the Arizona State University risk innovation lab. “The difficulty being that when software crashes, you just reboot the computer. When a car crashes, it’s a little bit more serious.”

Placing fledgling technology into untrained testers’ hands is an unorthodox approach for the autonomous vehicle (AV) industry. Other companies, such as Alphabet-owned Waymo, General Motors-backed Cruise and AV startup Aurora, use safety operators to test technology on predetermined routes. While the move has bolstered Tesla’s populist credentials with fans, it has proved reputationally risky. Since putting its tech into the hands of the people, a stream of videos documenting reckless-looking FSD behaviour has racked up numerous views online.

There’s the video of a car in FSD mode veering sharply into oncoming traffic, prompting the driver to swerve off the road into a field. The one that shows a car repeatedly attempting to turn on to train tracks and into pedestrians. Another that captures the driver struggling to regain control of the car after the system prompts him to take over. What would appear to be the first crash involving FSD was reported to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in November last year; no one was injured, but the vehicle was “severely damaged”.

FSD is proficient at driving on motorways, where it’s “straightforward, literally”, says Taylor Ogan, a Tesla FSD owner and chief executive of Snow Bull Capital. On more complex, inner-city streets, he says the system is more unpredictable. Continuous software updates are supposed to iron out glitches. For example, the NHTSA forced Tesla to prevent the system from executing illegal “rolling stops” (moving slowly through a stop sign without ever coming to a full stop, while an “unexpected braking” problem is the subject of a current inquiry. In Ogan’s experience of trialling FSD though, “I haven’t even seen it get better. It just does crazier things more confidently.”

Maynard says the “learner driver” metaphor holds for some of FSD’s issues, but falls apart when the technology engages in indisputably non-human behaviour. For example, a lack of regard for getting dangerously close to pedestrians and the time a Tesla ploughed into a bollard that FSD failed to register. Similar problems have emerged with Tesla’s Autopilot software, which has been implicated in at least 12 accidents (with one death and 17 injuries) owing to the cars being unable to “see” parked emergency vehicles.

There’s reason to believe that the videos that make their way online are some of the more flattering ones. Not only are the testers Tesla customers, but an army of super-fans acts as an extra deterrent to sharing anything negative. Any reports of FSD behaving badly can trigger a wave of outrage; any critical posts on the Tesla Motors Club, a forum for Tesla drivers, are inevitably greeted by people blaming users for accidents or accusing them of wanting Tesla to fail. “People are terrified that Elon Musk will take away the FSD that they paid for and that people will attack them,” says Ogan.

This helps to shield Tesla from criticism, says Ed Niedermeyer, the author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, who was “bombarded by an online militia” when he started reporting on the company. “Throughout Tesla’s history, this faith and sense of community… has been absolutely critical to Tesla’s survival,” he says. The proof, he adds, is that Musk can claim again and again to be a year from reaching full autonomous driving without losing the trust of fans.

But it’s not just Tesla that has missed self-imposed autonomous driving deadlines. Cruise, Waymo, Toyota and Honda all said they would launch fully self-driving cars by 2020. Progress has been made, but not on the scale anticipated. What happened?

“Number one is that this stuff is harder than manufacturers realised,” says Matthew Avery, director of research at Thatcham Research. While about 80% of self-driving is relatively simple – making the car follow the line of the road, stick to a certain side, avoid crashing – the next 10% involves more difficult situations such as roundabouts and complex junctions. “The last 10% is really difficult,” says Avery. “That’s when you’ve got, you know, a cow standing in the middle of the road that doesn’t want to move.”

It’s the last 20% that the AV industry is stuck on, especially the final 10%, which covers the devilish problem of “edge cases”. These are rare and unusual events that occur on the road such as a ball bouncing across the street followed by a running child; complicated roadworks that require the car to mount the kerb to get past; a group of protesters wielding signs. Or that obstinate cow.

Self-driving cars rely on a combination of basic coded rules such as “always stop at a red light” and machine-learning software. The machine-learning algorithms imbibe masses of data in order to “learn” to drive proficiently. Because edge cases only rarely appear in such data, the car doesn’t learn how to respond appropriately.

The thing about edge cases is that they are not all that rare. “They might be infrequent for an individual driver, [but] if you average out over all the drivers in the world, these kinds of edge cases are happening very frequently to somebody,” says Melanie Mitchell, computer scientist and professor of complexity at the Santa Fe Institute.

While humans are able to generalise from one scenario to the next, if a self-driving system appears to “master” a certain situation, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will be able to replicate this under slightly different circumstances. It’s a problem that so far has no answer. “It’s a challenge to try to give AI systems common sense, because we don’t even know how it works in ourselves,” says Mitchell.

Musk himself has alluded to this: “A major part of real-world AI has to be solved to make unsupervised, generalised full self-driving work,” he tweeted in 2019. Failing a breakthrough in AI, autonomous vehicles that function on a par with humans probably won’t be coming to market just yet. Other AV makers use high-definition maps – charting the lines of roads and pavements, placement of traffic signs and speed limits – to partly get around this problem. But these maps need to be constantly refreshed to keep up with ever-changing conditions on roads and, even then, unpredictability remains.

The edge-case problem is compounded by AV technology that acts “supremely confidently” when it’s wrong, says Philip Koopman, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “It’s really bad at knowing when it doesn’t know.” The perils of this are evident in analysing the Uber crash in which a prototype AV killed Elaine Herzberg as she walked her bicycle across a road in Arizona, in 2018. An interview with the safety operator behind the wheel at the time describes the software flipping between different classifications of Herzberg’s form – “vehicle”, “bicycle”, “other” – until 0.2 seconds before the crash.

The ultimate aim of AV makers is to create cars that are safer than human-driven vehicles. In the US, there is about one death for every 100m miles driven by a human (including drunk driving). Koopman says AV makers would have to beat this to prove their technology was safer than a human. But he also believes somewhat comparable metrics used by the industry, such as disengagement data (how often a human needs to take control to prevent an accident), elide the most important issues in AV safety.

“Safety isn’t about working right most of the time. Safety is all about the rare case where it doesn’t work properly,” says Koopman. “It has to work 99.999999999% of the time. AV companies are still working on the first few nines, with a bunch more nines to go. For every nine, it’s 10 times harder to achieve.”

Some experts believe AV makers won’t have to completely crack human-level intelligence to roll out self-driving vehicles. “I think if every car was a self-driving car, and the roads were all mapped perfectly, and there were no pedestrians around, then self-driving cars would be very reliable and trustworthy,” says Mitchell. “It’s just that there’s this whole ecosystem of humans and other cars driven by humans that AI just doesn’t have the intelligence yet to deal with.”

Under the right conditions, such as quiet roads and favourable weather, self-driving cars can mostly function well. This is how Waymo is able to run a limited robotaxi service in parts of Phoenix, Arizona. However, this fleet has still been involved in minor accidents and one vehicle was repeatedly stumped by a set of traffic cones despite a remote worker providing assistance. (A Waymo executive claimed they were not aware of these incidents happening more than with a human driver.)

Despite the challenges, the AV industry is speeding ahead. The Uber crash had a temporarily sobering effect; manufacturers suspended trials afterwards owing to negative press and Arizona’s governor suspended Uber’s testing permit. Uber and another ride-hailing company, Lyft, both then sold their self-driving divisions.

But this year has marked a return to hubris – with more than $100bn invested in the past 10 years, the industry can hardly afford to shirk. Carmakers General Motors and Geely and AV company Mobileye have said people may be able to buy self-driving cars as early as 2024. Cruise and Waymo both aim to launch commercial robotaxi operations in San Francisco this year. Aurora also plans to deploy fully autonomous vehicles in the US within the next two to three years.

Some safety experts are concerned by the lack of regulation governing this bold next step. At present, every company “basically gets one free crash”, says Koopman, adding that the regulatory system in the US is predicated on trust in the AV maker until a serious accident occurs. He points to Uber and AV startup Pony.ai, whose driverless test permit was recently suspended in California after a serious collision involving one of its vehicles.

A side-effect of Tesla sharing its technology with customers is that regulators are taking notice. Tesla has so far avoided the more stringent requirements of other AV makers, such as reporting crashes and systems failures and using trained safety professionals as testers, because of the claim that its systems are more basic. But California’s Department of Motor Vehicles, the state’s autonomous driving regulator, is considering changing the system, in part because of the dangerous-looking videos of the technology in action, as well as investigations into Tesla by the NHTSA.

The dearth of regulation so far highlights the lack of global consensus in this space. The question, says Maynard, is “is the software going to mature fast enough that it gets to the point where it’s both trusted and regulators give it the green light, before something really bad happens and pulls the rug out from the whole enterprise?”

UK Car Auction site

Tom Wood, 39, loves classic cars. In fact, the serial tech entrepreneur loves them so much he bought the widely used free listings website Car & Classic in 2018. He has taken the site from being a fairly rusty old banger, reliant on display advertising, to one handling £3.9 billion in transactions a year. Backed by the venture capital firm Passion Capital, he employs 105 people across Europe and expects revenues of £4 million last year to reach £8.2 million in 2023. The business makes commission on the cars sold using its auction software.

This is the ultimate barn find

My whole career has been about barn finds, the expression in classic car land where you’ll find this thing that’s been tucked away in a garage and almost forgotten about. It’s got a bit rusty and it’s got flat tyres. But I knew what it could become. The site today has about 36,000 classic vehicles on sale. Last year we did £3.9 billion worth of classic vehicle transactions through the site. So it’s this big, old beast.

But it didn’t have any way of making money. The only revenue model was a bit of advertising on the site. It had all this scale; that was pretty interesting. I thought, there’s an awful lot of commerce happening through this site. There must be a better way of monetising this than showing display ads on the site.

My previous career was buying distressed businesses or businesses that hadn’t necessarily innovated and doing digital transformation jobs on them, giving them a lick of paint.

At the start of the pandemic we built an online auction product [in two months], which is now our main earner. The site is still free for 90 per cent of people that use it, but if you want to sell your car faster you can put it on an online auction and we take a 6 per cent commission. Compare that to the physical auction experience, where they’re taking 15 to 25 per cent out of the transaction.

That [innovation] has been transformative for the business. We’ve doubled [revenues] year-on-year for the last three years. We auction between 40 and 50 cars a night, every day of the week except on Saturdays. Last year we finally turned off the display ads because they were such a distraction.

We take 90 per cent of the pictures and do the write-up. We will go through the history of the car, we’ll look for any flags like finance or previous damage or if the vehicle has been stolen. The seller then says, “Yes, I agree that’s an accurate representation of my vehicle.” What’s amazing is, actually, the more negative stuff you describe, the better the bidding tends to go because people know you’re not hiding stuff.

The consumer prefers this sit-at-home [experience], where they look at 100 pictures, watch the video and take time to make the decision on whether to buy this thing or not. As opposed to the pressure of being in an aircraft hangar somewhere, getting shouted out and having to make a split-second decision on it.

I collect the money from the buyer and only release that money to the seller when both parties are happy, so I need to make sure that the description is accurate. If the transaction doesn’t go through I don’t get paid, the seller doesn’t get paid and we’ve all wasted a bunch of time.

I am really proud of two sales in particular. There was a car called The Beast, which has a Spitfire engine in it. I think that was only £72,500 but it was just a ridiculous, eccentric British special thing.

The big car was the Ferrari “Daytona” that we sold [in March]. It was £451,000, a South African sale to a European buyer. As you get above £50,000 in vehicle value, that is genuinely a cross-border market. It just shows that people have got the confidence in an online platform. That buyer didn’t need to go and view that vehicle. They did it all through the platform, transferred the funds to us through the platform.

I think Car & Classic can be the de facto place to transact [classic cars] across all of Europe. We are pretty big already in France, Italy and Germany. That’s really where I’m focused. A lot of UK start-ups spend quite a lot of money going left, to the US. I’m pretty interested in going right.

The pan-European market is difficult, but it’s an interesting problem. They’re all different markets, different vehicle regulations, different languages. That’s my next couple of years. We launched an Italian site earlier this year and acquired a French business last year.

Other Resources

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