We might be a dying breed, but for some of us, driving is everything. Far more than a car lover, I consider myself a lover of driving. Say I want to catch up with someone who's in town for a few days – if they ask where I'm located, I'll simply say I can come to them since it's yet another opportunity to go for a drive.
This simple pleasure is something many – perhaps even most – view as a chore, which is why the concept of driverless cars has been floated for so long. Now, Elon Musk is clearly attempting to spearhead the next wave of autonomous vehicles with the debut of the Robotaxi and Robovan.
James May once joked on an episode of Top Gear that "driverless cars have already been invented – they're called taxis". Obviously, Mr Musk has his sights set clearly on competing with the likes of taxi and ride-share drivers for this stream of revenue as the Robotaxi's name suggests.
Had there not been a working example of it at the vehicle's launch, I'd have simply thought it was one of our AI-generated lab creations. Even without seeing it, you know what it looks like – the halfway point between a Cybertruck and a Model 3 if it happened to be a coupé.
The concept is straightforward and logical enough. I'd go so far as to call it 'clever' and 'good', as far as the execution is concerned. Two butterfly doors, a massive boot, and an utterly minimalist interior with two seats and a massive screen for streaming TV shows and films on.
That's right: no pedals, no steering wheel, no shifter. Even the fact the screen appears to prioritise streaming services over any sort of vehicle information says a lot. Forget those automated Jags which Waymo use in the States – Elon has gone all in.
On the other hand, the Robovan is quite a different beast. Looking more like the Henry Dreyfuss-designed Mercury trains which debuted in 1936, its Art Deco styling will make it look less at home on today's roads, but the concept of an autonomous shuttle for larger groups of people – or for moving larger objects – isn't that novel.
Back in 2017, I was invited to attend the International Driverless Vehicle Summit which was being held in Adelaide. As part of this, I was given the chance to sample three fully-autonomous vehicles. The first was the Aurrigo Pod Zero, which similar to the Robotaxi is designed for a smaller group. The Ligier EZ10 Easymile and Navya Autonom Shuttle were the other two, which are shuttles with seating or standing room for a double-digit number of passengers, much like the Robovan.
All three had no steering wheel, pedals, or shifter. All three broke at some point that morning while I was riding in them.
One started to go completely off-course as we left Adelaide Oval and began crossing the Riverbank Pedestrian Bridge; the softly-spoken Brit from the engineering team who accompanied us was extremely apologetic as he pulled out a wired Xbox 360 controller to manually take control and drive us back to home base.
Another had an inbuilt wheelchair ramp which automatically deploys before the doors slide open. Obviously, this malfunctioned and prevented the doors from opening. I don't speak a word of Mandarin, but I'm quite sure the Chinese engineer from that company was swearing a lot as he furiously bashed away at his laptop's keyboard, before being equally apologetic and kind to us once he'd finally got it to work 10 minutes later.
In the case of the last one, there had been some rain the night before and so there was the odd puddle on the ground. While driving along, it detected one of these puddles, causing the vehicle's brain to worry – "oh no, that could be a child running across the road!"
Like a bus, it had no seatbelts. The ferocity with which it applied the brakes sent the person sitting next to me flying across the floor and up to the front of the cabin.
Elon has done his best with these robo-creations, and Tesla's current Autopilot technology is still probably the best semi-autonomous driving tech in the business, so I'm sure they'll be better than those early attempts.
But having seen the need for someone to commandeer a rogue driverless car with an Xbox controller will likely radicalise even the most open-minded among us.
Driverless cars? I'll never trust them.
