Volkswagen has recently launched their new City Emergency Braking Function. This applies the brakes to the car if you are about to drive into another vehicle. However for legal reasons Volkswagen states that the system only partially applies the brakes. We understand that usually there is no impact but by not guaranteeing that there will be no impact, it avoids anyone suing VW in the rare case where there is. The system which is only designed to work at low speeds does seem to work quite well, it didn’t  however stop a journalist at VW’s launch from crashing into another vehicle. Perhaps he was pouring himself a drink at the time.

So we now have the system which will indentify a suitable parking space for the driver and then park the car and VW’s system to reduce/avoid the impact of an accident and of course Google, who in conjunction researchers from Stanford and Carnegie Mellon University is developing a car which drives itself.

This system is fairly well advanced; it uses, amongst other things, radar sensors, cameras and lasers Google have already carried out trials covering some 140,000 miles, without any mishaps. They are predicting that it will eventually save 600,000 lives a year, as a high proportion of accidents are caused by driver error.

Perhaps in the future the driving test will be just to see if you can operate all the sophisticated equipment that will be in cars. There are road signs to consider but perhaps those too will also become a thing of the past; Google has thousands of miles of roads mapped out which includes road signs for its Street View service.

It doesn’t seem like the motorist is going to have much to do in the future, perhaps the front seats of the car will swivel round and there will be a coffee table between the front and rear seats, so they can play cards to pass the time. All this additional technology is inevitably going to shorten the life of second hand cars, because it will make it too expensive to maintain an older car. Owners having to scrap cars earlier is an ideal scenario for the motor manufacturers.

We will just have to hope that all this technology works as it should; we wouldn’t want our car that drives on its own, to suddenly stop driving itself whilst we are taking a nap. Anyone who has seen the very old but excellent film Westworld with Yul Brynner, will know what can happen when technology goes wrong.