Here’s a fun little game: the perfect three car garage, but with a twist compared to the last time I played the "dream garage" game: one car has to be from the year of your birth, one from the year you first got your driver’s license, and one from the current day.

Here’s my line-up; what’s yours?

1980: Porsche 911 SC (Super Carrera)

I’d want to do a bit of work on this one: I’m not a fan of those hooded headlights, the stance is all wrong by today’s standards, and the bumpers would have to go as well. The main ingredients are all present and correct though, with a three-litre aluminium engine block, a five-speed gearbox, and those classic Fuchs wheels.

It turns out, there is not a huge amount of choice in 1980, falling in between the hangover from the 70s oil crisis and the coming over-the-top 80s, but you can never go wrong with a 911.

1998: Lamborghini Diablo SV

There’s a bit more choice in 1998, and in fact a couple of perfectly acceptable alternatives would be the Ferrari F355 or the Lotus Elise S1 — but with the 911 to play the role of the serious car, a Diablo is the biggest and baddest toy out there. It’s having a bit of a moment too, with a Diablo being wrecked during filming for Top Gear.

1998 is actually another gap year, as I just miss the Bugatti EB110, my all-time favourite supercar, while the likes of the Ferrari 360 are yet to come, but I wouldn’t feel too left out with a Diablo. I mean, take a look:

Current day: Audi RS6

Yes, same as last time, what of it? All of the power, all of the practicality, no compromise whatsoever — as long as you can afford the quite substantial cost, that is.

Here’s another video, with another Top Gear connection:

Yes, I think I could live with those three…

Next step: Competition!

An extension to this game is to find competition cars from those same three years.

1980: Fiat Abarth 131

Gotta have that Alitalia livery! Or alternatively, I’d be tempted to build one out kaido-racer style. The silhouette is not too dissimilar from an 80s Nissan Skyline… Imagine a 131, dropped on tiny gumball wheels, with even more over-the-top aero, one of the headlights replaced with a hole to let radiator hoses through, and so on. Japanese-Italian fusion done right, to avenge the insult of the Alfa Romeo Arna!

1998: Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR

Okay, this is a Straßenversion, because by 1998 race-car decals were getting pretty ugly, but still, look at it.

Current day: ???

To be honest I’ve fallen off the bandwagon of following motorsports, so I don’t have an entry here. If forced I would probably go with whatever James Glickenhaus is building, but it’s all getting a bit too silly for me to get much emotional involvement.

Having now put the first 2000km on my Giulia, across city, motorway, and twisty Alpine road, here are some first impressions and comparisons with the late lamented Beast.

Quite apart from all the differences inherent in going from a lardy SUV to a lithe sports saloon that weighs about as much as one of my old Cayenne’s doors, there is also more than a decade of evolution separating the two cars, so there are all sorts of changes to take into account. Overall though I am just so happy with my choice; the thing looks just perfect, subtle but aggressive, a brawler in an impeccably tailored Italian suit. The gamble with the paint colour paid off, despite looking nothing like the picture in the online configurator! It shifts between grey and blue, with bronze accents in the sunlight, and looks far better than that description – although the full effect doesn’t quite come across in pictures.

The Giulia also manages to pull off that trick that 911s have of feeling special even at parking speeds, and keeps it up all the way to the rev limiter – not that I have explored that too much yet, as I wanted to run the motor in somewhat gently. The good feeling is due in no small part to the mass of the engine being entirely behind the line of the front axle, contributing to that perfect weight distribution.

The lightness and sensitivity of the steering are a huge part of this "specialness", but it’s a feeling that is woven throughout the car, from the way the instruments are angled towards the driver, to the seats that offer a perfectly judged combination of comfort and firm bolsters holding you in place. The DNA modes also help, with a switch into Dynamic feeling like a shot of adrenaline straight into the driver’s veins, vision turning red at the edges in sync with the instruments.

I did miss the air suspension from the Beast on some of the broken cobbled surfaces in Milan, but apart from that I far prefer the Giulia’s sporty setup, which even in standard mode appears to have deep-seated religious objections to any roll in the body. In sport mode it adds a well-judged firmness without becoming crashy – in other words, it’s still comfortable on the straights, and then sends the car around corners absolutely flat.

Mostly my impressions from the test drive were confirmed in spades. It’s a taut, agile car; the engine is very willing even in automatic mode, but also rewards use of the paddles. A four-cylinder engine is inherently never going to sound as good as a V8, but the Beast was not especially vocal, while I suspect the Alfa team had a few meetings with the team that tunes the exhausts over at Abarth. It’s not nearly as bombastic as those little 500s, but the Giulia’s twin exhausts still manage to sound pretty fruity when you push on a bit.

One place where the Chrysler part of Fiat-Chrysler shows through is the very American-sounding beep which goes off if you change lanes without indicating. The lane departure warning can easily be turned on and off from a button on the end of one of the stalks, which is a very Italian touch that is convenient on a twisty mountain road where you're frequently crossing back and forth across the centre line.

There is also radar cruise control, which does a pretty decent job of keeping its distance from traffic. It could be better, as while the distance is adjustable, even the minimum distance is still quite far away, especially by the standards of Italian motorways. The system is also quite eager to drop a cog to accelerate back up to speed, which is not necessary at all. When I’m on the cruise control, by definition I’m in no hurry! Anyway, this feature is mostly helpful, but only with light traffic. In even moderate traffic, it’s too eager to back off, then surge back up to speed – not very relaxing.

The same radar sensor also drives a forward collision warning system, which, yes, I have already heard triggered. I was already braking, but it automatically activated the hazard lights when the warning fired, which could be useful when doing a full emergency stop.

The dashboard screen is gorgeous but not touch sensitive, which is initially disconcerting when trying to navigate CarPlay. After a month of use I think I actually prefer doing it through the clickwheel, as it’s much easier to get things done without taking my eyes off the road. The usual steering wheel buttons also help, with play/pause, cue, and volume buttons all present and correct. The other two ICE-related buttons are used to hang up on a call, and to trigger Siri, so I don’t really miss touching the screen at all.

On that note, it is so good to have physical controls in the cabin for functions like climate control. I don’t need to take my eyes off the wheel to make it cooler or warmer; there is a lovely tactile wheel that I can twist around a little or a lot, and know right away whether my action was registered. There’s also a physical control between the seats for the ICE, with volume, play/pause, forward/back, and screen off functions – very useful for the passenger, while the driver is probably best served using the steering wheel controls.

Bottom line, I absolutely love my Giulia. If you’re in the market for something similar, I highly recommend it. If you’re not up for the Veloce setup that I got (or for the full-beans Quadrifoglio monster!), you can get most of the same goodness on the Super, with the same two-litre motor in a milder 200bhp tune. Take a test drive, you won’t regret it!

Having used one of those electric scooters, I am now an expert on micromobility, and I have opinions.

Last week I was in Paris on business, which is always fun. This was a proper multimodal trip, encompassing the following forms of transportation:

• Personal car to the airport
• Aeroplane from Milan to Paris
• Moto taxi from CDG to my first meeting
• Uber to my next meeting
• Lime-S shared dockless scooter to my hotel
• Taxi to airport

The moto taxi is always a somewhat terrifying experience, but I’ve been using them for years. It’s basically the only way to get anywhere in Paris at rush hour in less than an hour. If you haven’t had the pleasure, the idea is that you ride on the back of a Honda Goldwing (or sometimes one of those large scooters), which is big enough for there to be plenty of space for a pillion passenger and for carry-on luggage. The rider kits you out with a reinforced jacket, a helmet (with disposable liner), and a waistcoat with airbags that is connected to the bike via a breakaway connection. If you are unlucky enough to come off the bike, airbags around the neck will inflate and (with any luck) prevent the worst-case scenario.

Perched up high on the back of a Goldwing is the best vantage point from which to appreciate that most of the gridlock is composed of cars with only a single occupant. This is obviously not ideal for anybody, which is why alternative forms of transportation are such a hot topic lately.

Later that day, all done with my meetings, I was going to take a Metro to my hotel – but there was some sort of delay on the line, and then I spotted a scooter just standing there… I already had the Lime app from using it in Berlin with the dockless electric-assist bicycles there, so why not?

Unfortunately that first scooter had a cut brake line – the Bay Area does not have a monopoly on scooter saboteurs! By this point I was committed, though, and the app showed me that there was another scooter just around the corner with a full charge.

This second scooter was undamaged and zipped along quite happily. In the centre of Paris 25 km/h is plenty fast enough to keep up with traffic, and most larger streets have bike lanes which are physically separated from the car traffic, so it’s a very fun experience. I was only travelling for a single overnight, so my rucksack was no problem.

Compare The Car

If I had had my car with me, I would first of all have had to pay through the nose for parking¹, not to mention the environmental impact of start-stop driving (this is what is driving the plan to ban internal-combustion vehicles in Paris by 2030). On top of that, driving in a congested situation like the centre of Paris is actually no fun at all.

The problem with the car is that my mobility needs would have been over-served, so I would only have experienced the downsides. The calculus would admittedly have changed slightly if it had been raining, or if I had had more luggage than a single rucksack, but then the delay on the Metro might have seemed more acceptable.

Either way, a full-size car is overkill in most (European) cities. Already today, my car hardly ever turns a wheel for journeys of less than a dozen kilometres. I would not want to ride a scooter to the airport (at 25 km/h!), but for a quick trip around town, a scooter or a bicycle are very hard to beat – especially if they could easily be augmented with public transport.

One factor that will help with uptake of these alternative forms of transportation is an easier way to bundle different forms of transportation together into a single logical "trip". This sort of aggregation is already beginning to emerge in various places: in San Francisco, the Uber app will let you rent JUMP bikes, while in Milan, dockless electric scooters can be unlocked using the Telepass app, which also lets users pay for motorway tolls, parking, congestion charges, and so on.

But Those Scooters Are In The Way!

My SF friends object to the scooters because they get left all over the place, obstructing pavements both when they are parked and when idiots ride the scooters on those pavements ("sidewalks", whatever) instead of sticking to the road or bike path. This is absolutely a real problem, but it’s not intrinsic to the scooters. It’s a combination of user education and available infrastructure. The Lime app I used in Paris asked me to take a photograph when I parked the scooter to make sure that it was parked somewhere appropriate. There are also red boxes on the map where the scooters cannot be left for any reason; Lime will charge users for retrieval if scooters are left in these areas.

These app features will already help to ensure that the scooters are in nobody’s way at rest. In motion, Paris’ excellent network of bike lanes reduces the incentive to ride on pavements. Given the width of American streets, there is plenty of room to add bike lanes there too, and to include physical protections beyond just a coat of paint. If there’s room to do this in the centre of Paris, there is room in every single American city, no exceptions.

I thoroughly enjoyed my multimodal trip, and I look forward to many more in the future.

They said they need real-world examples, but I don’t want to be their real-world mistake

That quote comes from a NYT story about people attacking self-driving vehicles. I wrote about these sentiments before, after the incident which spurred these attacks:

It’s said that you shouldn’t buy any 1.0 product unless you are willing to tolerate significant imperfections. Would you ride in a car operated by software with significant imperfections?
Would you cross the street in front of one?
And shouldn’t you have the choice to make that call?

Cars are just the biggest manifestation of this experimentation that is visible in the real world. How often do we have to read about Facebook manipulating the content of users’ feeds – just to see what happens?

And what about this horrific case?

Uhoh, This content has sprouted legs and trotted off.

Meanwhile, my details were included in last year’s big Marriott hack, and now I find out that my passport details may have been included in the leaked information. Marriott’s helpful suggestion? A year’s free service – from Experian. Yes, that Experian, the one you know from one of the biggest hacks ever.

I don’t want to be any company’s real world mistake in 2019.

🖼️ Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

Many petrolheads are worried that self-driving cars will kill the idea itself of the car. Personally, I’m not that worried about that; horses have not been a primary means of transport for maybe a century, and yet there still seem to be plenty of enthusiasts who enjoy them. I rode my bike side-by-side with a horse just last weekend.

No, my main concern is about the process of getting to fully self-driving cars. Today, we have cars with all sorts of safety features such as radar cruise control and lane-departure warnings. These already add up to a limited self-driving capability – level 2 or perhaps even 3 in the NHTSA definition. I have used some of this functionality myself on the German Autobahn, with my hired Volvo staying in its lane, following curves in the road, and accelerating or braking with the traffic, including coming to a complete stop.

I was never able to get out a book or just climb into the back seat for a nap, though. I always had to remain alert and engaged in case of any failure of the self-driving systems. Ultimately, I found this more wearing than just driving myself, and so I disengaged all the systems, got off the clogged-up Autobahn, and found myself a twisty and more engaging alternative route where I could concentrate fully on the driving.

This is the "uncanny valley" problem of self-driving cars: in order to get to full autonomy, we have to deal with a transition period where the automated systems are not yet good enough to do the job, but they are already good enough for drivers to become distracted and disengaged from the process of driving. The risk is that when the systems fail, the driver is not able to re-establish situational awareness and take control quickly enough to avoid an incident. We saw this scenario play out with tragic consequences when a self-driving Uber car struck and killed a woman earlier this year.

This problem of operator attention is of course not unique to cars, and may in fact have played a part in the tragic Lion Air crash in Indonesia. As part of the investigation of that crash, it was uncovered that a faulty air-speed sensor may have been the proximate cause of the accident, leading to the plane’s avionics mis-identifying the situation as a stall and putting the nose of the plane down to recover the speed necessary to get out of that stall.

The FAA has now issued a directive to operators of the plane to update their manuals. The linked article includes this image, purportedly from an internal Boeing magazine, describing the steps involved in identifying and correcting this situation:

You’re a pilot, climbing on autopilot on a routine departure – so you don’t have much airspeed or altitude to play with. Suddenly for no apparent reason the plane pitches nose-down. You have to diagnose the problem correctly, disengage a bunch of systems, and recover manual control. It’s a hard task, even for trained aircraft pilots.

Now imagine the same situation in a self-driving car. You’re on the phone, thinking about something else, and suddenly the car is drifting across lane markings, straight towards a concrete highway divider.

How do you rate your chances?

It is true that these systems will only improve with real-world usage and with more data to learn from, but their marketing and usage need to be aligned to their actual capabilities and failure modes, not what we wish they would be or what they might be in ideal conditions. New interface paradigms may also be required to set operators’ experience accordingly.

Until we get there, a sensible minimum standard seems to be that we should not expect drivers to do anything as a matter of course that is difficult even for trained airline pilots.

I am now the proud owner of my third¹ Alfa Romeo! Well, technically I’ve only made the down payment: the car itself will arrive in a couple of months, so a good late Christmas / early birthday present for me.

Much as I would have loved a Giulia Quadrifoglio, Italy’s horsepower tax (spit) tips that over from "maybe if I scrimp & save" to "sorry, not going to happen". What I really would have liked would have been a Giulia Sportwagon, but Alfa Romeo in their wisdom don’t make one of those. I wonder if this is the American influence speaking, as they have made wagon versions of all their previous cars, going back to the 33 Giardinetta?

Regardless, this lack of a wagon option means that I had a difficult decision between heart (Giulia Veloce – most of the good bits of the Quadrifoglio, but with a thriftier two-litre twin-turbo four-pot, sending 280 bhp to all four wheels) and head (Stelvio Bi-Tech – basically a Giulia on stilts and with a bigger boot).

I had a good long test drive of a Giulia Super, which the dealer had ready to go. This is basically the spec I wanted for a Veloce, but in a lower state of engine tune – 200 bhp instead of 280. As with most modern cars, the Giulia features keyless-go, which I don’t have strong feelings about one way or the other. Alfa Romeo however have taken this excuse to put the start/stop button on the steering wheel, Ferrari-style, which is admittedly a gimmick, but a good one.

Straight away the impressions were good, with light and sensitive steering, reacting instantly to inputs and giving good feedback through the wheel. The Alfa is not only far lighter than the Beast, it’s also the lightest of its peers, usefully edging the BMW 3-Series, the Mercedes-Benz C-Class, and the Audi A4. You can feel this lightness as soon as you turn the wheel, with a level of agility and responsiveness the others struggle to match. The transmission sends drive to all four wheels, but in normal use it’s heavily rear-biased, which also helps.

Even in lukewarm 200 bhp spec, this motor pulls well. Again, the lack of weight helps here, but it’s a willing engine, and it sounds good too. The eight-speed ZF gearbox is technically the same unit as in the Volvo V70 I also drove, but the feeling could not be more different. Left to do its own thing, it shuffles gears quite competently, and indeed invisibly, especially in normal driving. However, should you be in the mood, there are those paddles behind the steering wheel… Slap the BMW-style gearstick left into manual mode, and you are in full control, and I do mean full. The dealer sales rep was sitting beside me, so I couldn’t get too extreme, but I tried hard to catch the system out, and I simply couldn’t.

Alfa Romeo also offers its DNA drive-mode selector, and the three modes are indeed usefully different. You start in N, for Normal, which is a good description. In this mode everything is, well, normal; the car will trickle around town quite happily without making a fuss, but will also downshift promptly if you put your foot down. D is for Dynamic mode, and everything gets just a bit sharper-edged; the engine note hardens, the transmission hangs on to gears for a bit longer, the traction control relaxes a bit (it can’t be turned fully off except on the Quadrifoglio), traction shifts entirely to the rear wheels, and so on. The test car did not have the sport suspension fitted that I specced for my own car, but that is also affected. The third option in the DNA system is A, the All-Weather mode, with the traction control primed and ready to step in at any moment. This mode can also be used for motorway cruising, as a sort of "eco" mode, where it is quiet and unobtrusive.

In addition to the shape of the gear lever, there is something else in the cabin that is eerily reminiscent of BMW, and that is the in-car entertainment system. There is a click-wheel which is pretty much identical to an iDrive controller, driving a menu system which is also very similar to the BMW setup. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and indeed BMW’s iDrive is by far the best input system I have used. I can’t get on with Mercedes-Benz’s COMAND system, and Audi’s MMI is just a mess. Tesla-style systems that hide all the controls in a touchscreen are actively dangerous. Instead, the click-wheel systems that Alfa Romeo and BMW use allow drivers to memorise common paths through the system – two clicks left, press, three clicks right, press – for repeated tasks, without taking their eyes off the wheel.

I don’t intend to spend much time with the Giulia’s onboard systems, though, since it has a very good CarPlay implementation. Upon connecting the phone, the whole screen – a very nice 8.8" TFT, merged beautifully into the curve of the dashboard – is taken over by the CarPlay display, which can be navigated using that wonderfully tactile click-wheel, with its direct haptic feedback. Plus of course there’s Siri, available through her own button on the steering wheel, who will read you messages and take dictation in return.

Everything you touch in the Giulia’s cabin feels premium. In classic Alfa style, the instruments are very much focused on the driver, but all the control surfaces are pleasant, the ICE is competent but not intrusive, and all the other controls fall easily to the hand. The steering wheel in particular is a joy, adjusting easily to suit even my difficult requirements: I have long legs and so I sit quite far back, but even though I also have long arms, I like the steering wheel relatively close to me, low down but not so much that it obstructs the instruments. The sports seats also provide great lateral support during cornering.

When it comes to practical aspects, the boot is larger than I expected, but still compromised (as compared to a wagon) by a big cross-member that sits below the rear screen. Rear leg room is also perfectly adequate, even behind me, but not perhaps ample. These considerations persuaded me to also test-drive the Stelvio SUV.

This is basically the same car, just with longer suspension travel and a larger boot (and apparently slightly more rear leg room). This time I did get to drive the 280 bhp engine, but while I could feel the extra power, its impact was somewhat blunted by the extra weight. The Stelvio is still a light car for what it is, but it’s inevitably taller than the Giulia, and you do feel that when cornering. There is apparently an active suspension pack which mitigates some of the body roll, but it’s throwing technology at a physics problem which can be avoided by simply not jacking a Giulia up on stilts in the first place. I also don’t particularly like the fact that you can see the much smaller real exhaust tips hiding in plain sight inside the massive chromed fake tips. Petty, I know, but there it is.

Ultimately what made my decision was that, after the Beast, I’ve had my fill of SUVs and want to get back low to the ground. I would have happily bought a Giulia Sportwagon, but since Alfa Romeo won’t sell me one, I think I can make the saloon work. The Stelvio is a fine SUV and I would have been happy with it, but the Giulia is just better at being a car.

I did make a bit of a gamble on the colour, opting for what is apparently the rarest colour in the gamut: Grigio Lipari. In the configurator it looks almost burgundy, but in person it’s a rich grey-blue, shifting between one and the other depending on the light, with reddish flecks embedded beneath the surface. I think it will look great, especially with the diamond-cut version of the classic Alfa "telephone dial" wheels, but we shall see when it arrives.

I’m just happy to have rejoined the ranks of the Alfisti.

When it came to be time to replace the Beast, I had a shortlist to work from. I initially wanted a Mini Clubman, in John Cooper Works trim, but was informed by She Who Must Be Obeyed that this was simply not big enough to act as the main family car.

I therefore went back to the drawing board, refined the list to two cars, and started arranging test drives.

The first dealership I visited was Volvo, as I liked the idea of a plug-in hybrid¹, and nobody else seems to build them as cars – not SUVs, not city runabouts, but regular-sized family cars. The V70 seemed to fit the bill: gigantic load capacity, Volvo reputation for safety and reliability, and a plug-in hybrid drivetrain available. The Volvo setup even promised some potential for fun, as the hybrid system allows the driver to ghost silently around town on electric power alone, drive normally using the petrol engine, or combine both for a 400 bhp hit.

Unfortunately it was not possible to arrange a test-drive of the hybrid option. This was my first warning sign, especially when I tried other dealers in nearby cities and nobody had one to drive, not even fitted to a different car (the same drivetrain powers the larger V90 wagon, as well as the XC60 and XC90 SUVs and S70 and S90 saloons). I am not excited by the idea of owning some sort of unicorn and potentially having to wait for parts to be shipped from China if anything goes wrong.

Regardless, I agreed to test-drive a V70 with the popular D4 drivetrain. This is a common-or-garden turbo diesel four-pot, which sounds quite clattery from the outside of the car. On the inside, Volvo’s usual understated Scandinavian luxury muffles the racket to a distant drone, but it’s never a particularly pleasant sound.

That first impression of luxury was short-lived, though. The test-drive car had a middle-of-the-road Business spec, which looked fine but did not quite live up to its billing when it came to various important touch-points. The engine is started by twisting a little knob, which felt fiddly and flimsy. The steering wheel was nice enough, but had some very rough stitching right where the driver’s thumbs rest. The buttons all felt plasticky, too.

These may seem like quibbles, and indeed I would happily be able to put up with them on a Škoda, or indeed on something that compensated by being more driver-focused. However, the Volvo’s big selling point is that it’s a nice, safe place to be. It plays on that Scandinavian notion of hygge, which is probably best translated as "coziness", although that does not quite cover it. For a car this expensive, everything I touch has to fit into that overall impression. Instead, every touch point I came in contact with undermined that cozy feeling.

The next disappointment was the in-car stereo. New Volvos have an iPad-style portrait-oriented touchscreen high in the middle of the dashboard. This is fine, although I found it a bit distracting even on a brief test-drive. It doesn’t go quite as far as new Teslas in putting all the controls there, but it goes far enough in that direction that I would worry about not being able to access controls easily on the move without taking my eyes off the road.

CarPlay is also a must-have feature for me, and as Volvo was a launch partner of this technology, I was looking forward to testing out their implementation. Unfortunately, it took far too long to get my phone recognised by the Volvo’s systems, and once it was connected (by cable – still no wireless CarPlay 2), instead of taking over that big screen, it just created a little letterbox window towards the bottom, with the rest of the Volvo chrome still cluttering up the rest of the screen. The resulting CarPlay view was actually smaller than my iPhone X’s screen, which undermines a large part of what makes CarPlay useful in the first place.

The driving experience was pretty much as expected: very competent in a quiet way, and almost entirely insulated from the road. In typical Volvo fashion, the V70 is loaded with safety systems, all of which seem to be well thought out. I particularly liked the lane-departure warning system, which gently guides you back into your lane if you stray across a white line – unless your indicator is on, in which case it assumes you know what you’re doing. It doesn’t vibrate the wheel or do anything annoying, instead simply applying a little extra pressure to the power steering. It’s possible to override this guidance quite easily, but it’s just enough to catch your attention. Imagine Jeeves delivering a quiet cough to draw your attention to a potentially unfortunate choice, but resigning himself with a pained look if you do insist.

Despite this late break, and the truly cavernous boot ("trunk" for American readers), the test drive was a bit of a let-down. I don’t know whether my reaction might have been different if I had been able to drive the sportier hybrid R-Design spec I had in mind, but I got out of the car with that feeling I get when I hand back a rental car: "that was perfectly fine, but I’m glad I’m going back to my own car now". In other words, I had no intention of spending my own money on the thing, especially once the salesman made it clear he was extremely uninterested in offering me any reasonable trade-in on the Beast.

A pity; I was ready to embrace the green EV/hybrid lifestyle, but it seems it was not meant to be – yet, at least.

I bought a new car today. More on that later, but for now, I wanted to give a proper send-off to the Beast.

The Beast in a rare moment of looking small beside another car

Oh yes, it’s still in rude good health. I’m not selling it because of anything that is wrong with it, it’s just time to move on.

It is true that the Beast did finally blot its previously-unblemished copybook when it came to maintenance. While the Turbo engine is more reliable than the non-Turbo ones in this generation of Cayenne, it does have one notorious Achilles’ heel: Porsche engineers, in their wisdom, decided to fit two cooling pipes made of plastic that run basically right under the engine. Shockingly, this turns out to be a terrible idea, and the pipes are known to fail. Unfortunately, because it’s a horrible job – not quite engine-out, but near enough – it’s not the sort of thing you would do as preventative maintenance, or that you could tack on to routine maintenance. As an owner, you cross your fingers and hope.

Well, my luck finally ran out over the summer, and I had to get a tow back from a dinner in the wee hours of the morning, and then pay an unconscionable amount of money to have the busted plastic pipes replaced with more robust aluminium versions. I don’t think I’ve ever paid a bill that had a worse ratio of parts to labour! Then again, I got off fairly lightly compared to one owner, who had the broken pipes dump coolant right onto the tyres and ended up wrecking his car as a result.

Apart from that, though, the Beast is still a beast. Its party trick is still the mountains of torque that it can throw at any problem. It’s not that good at a standing start, because the traction control and gearbox do not get on particularly well together. I mean, it can be done, and 0-100 kph in five seconds flat is nothing to sneeze at in something that big and heavy, but the process is so unpleasant if you have any mechanical sympathy at all that it’s not really worth doing regularly.

Moving smoothly off the line is a better bet. Once the Beast is rolling, the combination of big-displacement V8 and a brace of turbochargers gives in-gear acceleration that can only be described as "violent". Motorway slip roads are the perfect environment for this sort of thing; as the on-ramp straightens out, simply floor the throttle. The Tiptronic transmission takes a moment to gather its thoughts, then drops into third, a donkey kicks you in the small of your back, and suddenly you are going very fast indeed, with the V8 bellowing and the turbochargers adding a shrill wail over the top. Around 6500 rpm – not too shabby for a big turbocharged lump like this – the Beast changes up into fourth and continues accelerating just as violently, and by the time fifth gear shows up it’s high time to back off the throttle and coast back down to the speed of the traffic.

That rush never gets old, and the looks of shock and awe on the face of other drivers when they see a big SUV move like that are just the icing on the top.

However, the Beast is getting to be an old lady, and there are more big bills lurking in its future. The timing belts will need doing soon, as will all four brake disks. I also had to send the summer tyres for recycling, and the sorts of compounds the Beast requires are fearsomely expensive, especially given the sheer acreage of rubber involved. Finally, even though it’s over ten years old and therefore benefits from the maximum discount, Italy’s horsepower tax is just too painful to deal with any longer.

I’ll miss the space, the comfort (enhanced by the air suspension), and the commanding driving position, not to mention the enormous thrust. I won’t miss the thirst, though, especially since the V8 is mostly inaudible from the cabin in normal driving, without any deep-chested burble to make you feel like you are getting your money’s worth for all that petrol you’re burning. It’s also worth noting that I used the locking diffs and low-range gearbox exactly twice in nearly four years of ownership, thereby proving every stereotype about SUVs’ typical usage patterns.

So it’s farewell Beast, and hello younger, more supple model. More on the car hunt soon, as well as the final choice!

I always get very irritated by people in new high-end cars – ones that certainly have Bluetooth, if not CarPlay or Android Auto – using their phones in their hands. What, you can’t spare thirty seconds to set up the hands-free connection once? After that you can keep your phone in your pocket/handbag/briefcase/whatever, and have both hands free for the actual driving! But no, you have to drive one-handed, or with the phone squeezed between your head and shoulder like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, squinting sideways at the road.

Today, however, I saw something that beats that. This person did have her phone connected to hands-free, and I know because everyone in the street could hear her conversation over the cranked-up stereo. However, for whatever unknowable reason, she was still holding the actual phone in her hand.

I was so flabbergasted I missed my chance to take a photograph of the madness.

Now I have real concerns about how this woman lives the rest of her life. Does she put boots on over her shoes? Or try to use knife, fork, and spoon all at the same time?

Truly autonomous driving is an incredibly hard problem to solve. It would be hard enough in controlled situations, but in uncontrolled ones, where other road users may or may not be respecting the rules of the road¹, it’s pretty close to being impossible to achieve a perfect solution. The best we can hope for is one that is better than the current state of affairs, with distracted human drivers taking an incredible toll on life.

That is the promise of self-driving cars: get the dangerous, unpredictable humans out of the loop. Getting there, however, is tough. It turns out that the tragic death of a woman in Arizona due to a failure of an Uber experiment in autonomous driving may have been caused by the uncanny valley of partial autonomy.

Let’s take it as given that fully-autonomous (Level 5) vehicles are safer than human-driven ones. However, nobody has built one yet. What we do have are vehicles that may on occasion require human occupants to take control, and to do so with very little warning. According to the crash reports, the Uber driver in the Arizona crash had no more than six seconds’ warning of an obstacle ahead, and perhaps as little as 1.3 seconds.

Contrary to some early reports, the driver was not looking at a smartphone (although more time for our phones is one of the benefits to be expected from actual self-driving cars), but at "a touchscreen that was used to monitor the self-driving car software":

"The operator is responsible for monitoring diagnostic messages that appear on an interface in the center stack of the vehicle dash and tagging events of interest for subsequent review," the [NTSB] report said.

The Uncanny Valley

I wrote about this uncanny valley problem of autonomous vehicles before:

as long as human drivers are required as backup to self-driving tech that works most of the time, we are actually worse off than if we did not have this tech at all.

In the first known fatal accident involving self-driving tech, the driver may have ignored up to seven warnings to put his hands back on the wheel. That was an extreme case, with rumours that the driver may even have been watching a film on a laptop, but in the Arizona case, the driver may have had only between four and one seconds of warning. If you’re texting or even carrying on a conversation with other occupants of the car, four seconds to context-switch back to driving and re-acquire situational awareness is not a lot. One second? Forget it.

Uber may have made that already dangerous situation worse by limiting the software’s ability to take action autonomously when it detected an emergency condition:

the automated braking that might have prevented the death of pedestrian Elaine Herzberg had been switched off "to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior." Such functions were delegated to the driver, who was simultaneously responsible for preventing accidents and monitoring the system’s performance.

In other words, to prevent the vehicle suddenly jamming on the brakes in unclear situations like the one in Arizona, where "the self-driving system software classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, as a vehicle, and then as a bicycle with varying expectations of future travel path", Uber simply opted to delegate all braking to the "safety driver" – while also requiring her to "monitor the system’s performance". This situation – distracting the driver who is also expected to take immediate (and correct) action in an emergency – could hardly have been better designed to produce the outcome we saw in Arizona.

This is exactly what I predicted in my previous post on Uber:

Along the way to full Level 5 autonomy, we must pass through an "uncanny valley" of partial autonomy, which is actually more dangerous than no autonomy at all.
Adding the desperate urgency of a company whose very survival depends on the success of this research seems like a very bad idea on the surface of it. It is all too easy to imagine Uber (or any other company, but right now it’s Uber), with only a quarter or two worth of cash in the bank, deciding to rush out self-driving tech that is 1.0 at best.
It’s said that you shouldn’t buy any 1.0 product unless you are willing to tolerate significant imperfections. Would you ride in a car operated by software with significant imperfections?
Would you cross the street in front of one?

What Next?

Uber has now ceased tests of self-driving cars in Arizona, but it is continuing the work in Pittsburgh, having already been kicked out of San Francisco after one of its self-driving cars ran a red light right in front of SFMOMA.

Despite these setbacks, it is however continuing work on its other projects, such as flying taxis.

Thats seems perfectly safe, and hardly at all likely to go horribly wrong in its own turn.

GIF is of a drone almost crashing into a skier during a race in Madonna di Campiglio.