Rather depressingly, my first driving experience and the first car I owned were the same, in that, the model of the car was the same. The car I learned driving on was my mother’s, a basic model of the Vauxhall Cavalier Mark 1, 1.6L. I started learning to drive on the road with my dad in 1978, and in 1979, I got my own Vauxhall Cavalier Mark 1, 1.6L — yeah, I wasn’t very imaginative! They were two different cars, two different colours, but they happened to be the same model, which was a pure coincidence. I even remember the registration numbers of both cars.
Today, I actually own two Ferraris — and I know that sounds boastful — one is the Ferrari 458 Speciale and the other is a 70s 308 GTB. Unfortunately, they are both broken at the moment and are being mended. The 458 has a bit of paint damage, as we were driving on gravel on the runway for a spot of filming. It is an unusual orange and the front needs to be painted, so it may end up going to Maranello for the job, but it looks great! It’s the best Italian car I have driven.
I am always excited about the future because I think the world gets better. Some things I am slightly unconvinced about. Maybe we will have autonomous cars by 2050. But I don’t think they are quite as close as we imagine. We have lulled ourselves into thinking that cars have radar cruise control and lane departure warning systems, so they will stay between the white lines and so forth. These mechanisms are the building blocks, but they are a long way from a car where you could sit in the back and go to sleep and have it drive you home. The history of Robotics shows that few things in science are more disappointing than our progress in robotics.
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Driving cars is one of the most impressive things that humans do, and it’s a bad place to start your robot ambitions with, because it’s very complicated. By 2050, maybe, we would have done it. But I suspect we may not have cars at all. I don’t think we will move around on the surface of the earth. I think we will move through the sky. We may well be doing the Christmas Special of The Grand Tour on Mars or the Moon. We may move through the air powered by anti-matter. We may be teleporting if we can process the data quickly enough and at a big-enough volume. Then it is theoretically and even practically possible!
As told to Lata Ganapathy
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The Grand Tour Series 2 International Press Junket)