A few months back I was invited onto the panel of a discussion about cycling as part of a series of eco debates held in Islington off the back of
a blog I wrote here
. Not natural territory for a PH editor? Well, I did fear I was being set up as 'the voice of the enemy' and the embodiment of motorised terror. But with Boris Johnson's 'cycling tsar' Andrew Gilligan on the panel too I took a punt on not being the most hated man in the room.
Why am I telling you this and what does it have to do with four-wheeled PHers? Well, we might fuss and moan about the death of the manual gearbox and subsequent loss of interaction with our cars but Volvo's Cyclist Detection system, which has just earned an award at the 'Techies', symbolises to me a more worrying and pernicious trend.
Autonomous driving, as tested by PistonHeads
Basically Volvo's system bleeps if a cyclist pulls out and can even brake the car to a halt. The designers clearly haven't ever driven in London because if that were to happen every time a bike moved in front of a car there'd be gridlock. And a lot of stationary Volvos, bleeping. Which would at least censor the responses of those stuck behind.
From a two- or four-wheeled perspective these systems scare the bejesus out of me, based on the fact that anything that removes a sense of responsibility from either party can't be a good thing. If cyclists think they can stick their headphones on and ride out in front of cars and they'll stop of their own accord and drivers reckon they don't need to look any more we're reaching a very worrying state of affairs.
Same applies to all these lane-keeping assistance systems, automated braking doo-dads, blind-spot warnings, sat-nav driven 'predictive' gear changing and the rest. If we're going to have autonomous driving then let's just crack on and do it - as PH has proved with typical scientific rigourwe're pretty much there already, freeing you up to, in Nick's case, do crazy jazz hands poses. Or text, or snooze or whatever else.
Meanwhile those of us Luddites who do still want to drive can get back to using the old Mk1 Eyeball and relying on common sense and a bit of mutual respect. Sound like a deal?