BRITAIN has become the first country in Europe to legalise hands-free, self-driving cars.
The technology has been fitted as standard to Ford’s new Mustang Mach E for some time, but at midnight on Wednesday it became “live”. So now you just pay £17.99 a month and relax.
Except you can’t. By law, you actually have to be there, in the driving seat, paying attention.
There are even sensors which constantly monitor your eyes to make sure you are looking where you’re going.
Ford is calling the system “Blue Cruise” — which sounds like something Cunard might offer to swingers — and says it’s been working well in America for months.
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They say that 193,000 customers have, between them, covered 64million miles, and so far there hasn’t been a single accident.
Human error
That’s great, I’m sure, but America is not like Britain.
There are no double mini-roundabouts for a start, and most of the streets are so wide you could kip for an hour and still not hit anything.
It’s not like that in Britain.
Mercifully, the Ford system is only a level-two device.
This means the vehicle can control the steering and the speed and nothing else.
But boffins are already hard at work on level-five full automation, which they say will allow the driver to set the destination then fall asleep.
Yeah. In the same way that you could fall asleep if there’s a lion in the room.
There’s another issue with these fully autonomous cars.
Because sure, when you are low on groceries, you can send it into town and tell it where to park.
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But then what? It can’t actually go into the shop to buy the milk and eggs.
You have to do that, which means you have to be there.
And if you have to be there, you may as well do the driving. It’s not that hard.
Even James May can do it.
Of course, fans of the tech say it will remove human error from the road network.
But hang on a minute because are they saying that humans are less reliable than apps?
Even if you do believe that electronics are safer than people, let me ask you this.
The vast majority of plane crashes are caused by pilot error. This is a known fact.
It’s also a known fact that planes these days are perfectly capable of taking off, flying and landing all by themselves.
Statistically then, it makes sense to get rid of the pilots.
But would you get on a plane that had no humans in the cockpit?
Me neither.
A NEW survey has revealed that half of British people back the Rwanda repatriation scheme. But don’t think it has a prayer of working.
Of course it won’t. This government can’t even fix a simple problem like potholes, or fly tipping.
A million incidents were recorded last year but somehow, only 2,000 resulted in legal action.
So if it can’t sort this stuff out, what chance does it have of filling planes with immigrants and convincing them they’re off for a happy new life in the sun?
CALL IN CHOP-A SQUAD
SIR Starmer announced this week that if he wins the next election, half of the food bought by the public sector would be home-grown.
Hmmm. I fear he will have problems achieving this goal, because an investigation by Farmers Weekly magazine – my new bible – has found that food which is labelled as British often isn’t British at all.
And that it didn’t meet our safety standards either.
They have found that every week, one major food manufacturer has been passing off tens of thousands of tons of foreign pork as home- grown.
And that it’s ended up on the shelves of Tesco, Co-op, Morrisons, M&S, Sainsburys and Aldi.
Happily, this country has a Food Crime Unit.
So chaps, put down your new guidelines on pronouns, and fire up the Quattro. There’s work to be done.
And heads that need to roll.
PLANE ODD OF BIDEN
CRITICS have suggested that on his trip to Ireland this week, Joe Biden made it very clear that he’s no big fan of the United Kingdom.
How do they know?
I’ve listened to all of the US president’s speeches and utterances, and it was almost impossible to determine what he was on about.
He definitely said something about dogs. Or maybe it was bogs. Or logs. And then he shook hands with a pot plant.
All I do know is that after touching down in Air Force One, he emerged from the cargo door.
Why? Did he travel down there, or are the stairs from the main cabin too difficult for him these days?
Britain’s facing an invasion by beavers? Dam!
THE big furry beaver is back. And already, it may be out of control.
A Welsh couple set up a trap camera to find who or what was ruining the trees in their garden and were amazed to find the culprit was a beaver.
Animal enthusiasts, who are running carefully controlled experiments to reintroduce the rodent to our shores, say that none of theirs have escaped.
Which means this one is living in the wild.
Some would say this is good news. Beavers are very good at managing riverbanks.
But others reckon that, left to their own devices, things can quickly get out of hand.
I once spoke to a Chilean chap who told me that to try to stop a million-strong army of Argentine beavers wreaking havoc on their forests, the government built a fence. Did it work?
“No”, he said. “They ate the fence.”
BRYN A £260m HERO
BACK in 2006, I received word that Ben Parkinson, a young paratrooper from my home town of Doncaster, had been very seriously injured by an anti-tank mine in Afghanistan.
He had lost three limbs and was in a coma, but his mother wondered if I could come and speak with him, as he’d always been a fan of Top Gear.
So off I went to Selly Oak hospital in Birmingham, and I simply could not understand why the wounded soldiers were there on a general ward, surrounded by doolally old bats and racists.
We were sending these guys off to fight and it was instantly clear we didn’t have the proper facilities to look after them if they got hurt.
I was horrified but I didn’t have the first clue what to do about it.
Luckily, however, there was another man who shared my concerns.
He was a graphic artist called Bryn Parry and, along with his wife Emma, he did know what to do.
He started a charity called Help for Heroes, with the goal of raising £5million to modernise facilities at the Armed Forces rehabilitation centre in Surrey.
He rather overshot and soon his charity had raised a staggering £260million.
This week, however, Bryn died and I’d just like to say this.
He devoted much of his life to helping heroes, but he was probably the biggest hero of them all.
