Testing, testing

"The most vital connection is to the nut behind the wheel❞

- MATT SAUNDERS

The driverless car now seems to have become a risky, possibly even toxic prospect for a great many industry powers. Having invested keenly, the big traditional players - Ford, Volkswagen, General Motors - have pulled back.

It was a bit of holiday reading that made me realise how starkly attitudes have changed on the subject. In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, historian Yuval Noah Harari writes with startling certainty about “AI's potential to reduce the world’s million annual driving-related deaths to practically zero”.

So I checked when this book was published: 2018. Bang on the pace, as ever, Saunders. Since then, the world has had its first recorded case of a pedestrian being killed by an autonomous vehicle: Elaine Herzberg, 49, in March 2019 in Tempe, Arizona, as she pushed her bicycle across a highway in front of one of Uber's experimental self-driving Volvo XC90s.