The future of self-driving cars?

I’ve just been driven around central London in a Jaguar I-Pace. The driver was pretty good: smooth but assertive, showing anticipation but not hesitation, and fitting in with the flow of the traffic around us.

We slowed for a bus that had stopped in our lane: an oncoming bus didn’t leave us enough space to squeeze past at first, but the driver could see that the cars that followed it did, so we slowed just enough to let the moving bus pass before confidently straddling the centre line to pass the stationary one. We slowed for a jaywalker too, but again just enough to let her reach the kerb safely, and the driver knew better than to cheekily follow a forklift which drove through a red temporary traffic light at a construction site.

I soon fell into conversation with the other passenger, as you do when you’re comfortable with someone else’s driving. That’s not something that always happens in an Uber, but this was no Uber and the driver, as you’ve doubtless guessed from the headline, wasn’t human. There was a human behind the wheel, Joe’s hands permanently poised to assume control as the regulations governing autonomous cars being tested in the capital require. But it never once felt like he’d need to.