HS2 is already obsolete, David Cameron should be preparing the UK for self-driving cars
Thats it then – say goodbye to the redundant world of trains and welcome in the driverless car – the end to all our rural transport problems according to this article which tells us:
Some of the world’s cleverest scientists and engineers, including those at Google, are pioneering a new generation of driverless cars that will change our lives as much as the internet has already done.
David Cameron likes to think that he is making Britain more like California but his embrace of the £35bn taxpayer-financed HS2 project linking London to the Midlands and the North is, in fact, shockingly outdated, making him sound more like a French bureaucrat desperate to build monuments to himself than an enabler of US-style disruptive entrepreneurship.
The idea of self-driving vehicles will sound like science-fiction to many, barmy even, but the prototypes already work, using 360-degree sensors, lasers, learning algorithms and GPS to navigate streets in an astonishingly precise fashion. They are likely to go mainstream in 15 to 20 years’ time and are a genuinely exciting, game-changing breakthrough that refute the myth that our economy has ceased to spawn major technological innovations.
Google’s vehicles have already driven more than 400,000 miles without an accident and are beginning to be legalised in US states.