You need a fair bit of nerve to get in any kind of car on the streets of Los Angeles. This very morning I have been watching the TV news in our hotel, and when they aren’t talking about hush money for Stormy Daniels they are going to live traffic reports – and boy, this is Prang City.
Every major artery is flashing with pile-ups, and you have the impression that the Angelenos are in a state of constant collision, like some form of sub-atomic particles. Heaven knows what they are doing: looking at the stock market, walloping their kids, craning their necks to read the ubiquitous giant billboards advertising the services of Better Call Saul-type accident lawyers.
Whatever the reason, the population of this city suffers from 52,000 motor vehicle accidents every year – that’s over 140 shunts, bumps, dings and fender-benders every day, and I am afraid there are of course many hundreds of human beings who are either badly injured or lose their lives.
All this carnage is happening in normal motor vehicles, where the drivers are meant to be paying the utmost attention to the road. We are talking about conventional machines, where human beings are doing their level best – with all their jangling senses – to anticipate each other’s mistakes, to study the traffic, and to turn the steering wheel in time.
Driverless Teslas – a new type of car, so preposterous, so audacious, so revolutionary that ten years ago I would have refused to believe that it was possible, writes Boris Johnson
Today, however, I am about to entrust my life, and the lives of my wife and ten-month-old baby, to an entirely different species of machine: a machine where no one – or at least no human being – is in control.
We are about to be conveyed in a new type of car, so preposterous, so audacious, so revolutionary that ten years ago I would have refused to believe that it was possible. Maybe on some test track; maybe in lab conditions – but I never expected to see it in the heavy traffic of a major urban centre.
I am about to embark on the seething Limpopo of the LA streets, full of predatory crocs and barging hippos, in a car that drives itself. We are getting in a car without eyes to see, without hands to indicate, and without feet to slam on the brakes.
This car has no natural terror, none of the paranoia that is so vital for human drivers. It has only dozens of tiny cameras, the size of jelly tots, discreetly and mainly invisibly concealed about its sleek white bodywork; and it has a neural system, an electronic brain, that is getting more powerful with every week that passes.
I can report, Ladies and Gents, that the overall effect is astonishing. You remember the bit in the poem when stout Cortes first sees the Pacific from the Andes mountains, and looks upon it with eagle eyes while all his men gaze at each other with a wild surmise*?
Those are the kind of looks that are darting between us – wild surmise – as we move off smoothly in that self-driving Tesla.
I am sitting at the wheel, but not touching it, and though my feet are near the pedals, I am not using them – and Oh my word, the steering wheel is twiddling itself.
It’s eerie at first, like watching a ghost depress the keys of a piano. Now it’s indicating, giving way, floating across the traffic with all the delicacy and tact of a living chauffeur. It’s so human, I gasp, so smooth.
‘Buttery smooth,’ assents the man from Tesla. He is there to watch over his expensive prototype but doing nothing, I assure you, to drive it or control it.
Now we have come to a very tricky crossroads, where five roads meet, in the middle of Beverly Hills, and we have to go left. The traffic is coming towards us quite fast, barrelling busily down the streets with their lofty palms and $100million homes.
What the hell happens, I wonder, if this thing malfunctions now?
Embarrassing or what? What if it has some fit, some suicidal episode like the onboard computer in 2001, A Space Odyssey? What if Putin is already inside its brain, and some Russian bot is preparing to hurl us headlong into the oncoming wall of steel?
What if it suffers from some satnav malfunction, and suddenly has no idea where it is?
Don’t worry, says the man from Tesla. It doesn’t need satellites. And he is right. With impeccable good manners, giving all other vehicles plenty of notice, we turn left, and I become so relaxed that I am able to take in the boldness of Tesla’s plan.
There are already a few driverless cars on the roads of LA that have a licence to carry passengers. They are run by a firm called Waygo, and they have big rotating sensory turrets on the roof. But they can ply only a very small part of the city, because they are specifically programmed to understand those streets.
This Tesla machine is far more ambitious, and its cameras and neural network will allow it to go anywhere – as soon as it is fully licensed and approved.
‘It’s more than safe,’ says the man from Tesla. ‘It’s five or six times safer than a human driver.’
Think what we human drivers have to do, he explains. You are constantly looking at the road, constantly turning around. ‘But even if you have eyes in the back of your head, you don’t see as much as we do. We see 100 per cent.’
As he speaks a man slowly totters into the traffic in front of us, looking a bit the worse for wear. Instinctively I reach for the wheel; my toe twitches for the brake; but I need not have worried.
The car has long since anticipated me, and has the man under observation – indeed a tiny human figurine has appeared on the electronic streetscape on the dashboard.
Effortlessly we slow and swoop around him. At the end of about 45 minutes I feel like a driving test examiner – except that I want to tell the car that it has passed, with flying colours.
There was only one moment of mild confusion, when we pulled up in front of the Waldorf Astoria hotel. A uniformed doorman appeared, and waved us forward.
The car did not move. The man waved again. Still the car did nothing.
Ah yes, said the man from Tesla. ‘It doesn’t yet recognise that gesture, but we are fixing it for the next iteration. It should be done next month.
‘This car is incredible – but it’s the worst it’s ever going to be, and it’s getting exponentially better.’
It was in 2009 that I first test-drove an electric Tesla roadster, then shaped like a Lotus. It conked out on the M40, and I was left with some scepticism about the future of the brand.
Well, I am not making that mistake again. It seems outlandish now. It seems bonkers. But I have seen enough to know it’s going to happen, and that sooner or later there will be a tipping point.
Everyone will be doing it: reading a book, playing cards, or just snoozing at the wheel of vehicles moving under their own volition: faster, more quietly, with less pollution – and more safely.
Literary Corner
*On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer: a sonnet by John Keats describing his wonder while reading the ancient Greek poet Homer as translated by Elizabethan playwright George Chapman