Would you trust a driverless Waymo cab? Our columnist is now a fan after jumping aboard
Waymo
Have you seen the reboot of The Grand Tour? Probably not if you’re not an Amazon Prime subscriber, but if you like car shows actually presented by car people, you should, because the team has shown the BBC how to do it. Whereas only a handful of episodes from the last 10 series of post-Clarkson Top Gear scraped an IMDB rating over 6.0, every episode of the new Grand Tour ranks at or above 8.0. And as anyone familiar with the 40th most visited website in the world will know, that difference is night and day. It’s also very close to the figures Top Gear was doing in its heyday.
Why? I knew the answer the moment I walked into a room to interview the new presenters James Engelsman, Thomas Holland and Francis Bourgeois. They have the natural rapport so essential for success but, far more importantly, they are car people – car nerds you might say – to their very boots, even Francis who is by far the most famous of the trio, but almost entirely for his love of trains.
I did ask him to explain his love for locomotives (he far prefers diesel to steam) and his response was erudite and passionate. I was captivated not by the subject, but the way it was being communicated to me. And that’s the thing: these three are brilliant communicators, deeply committed to their subject and also happen to get on really well. From whence the magic springs. The problem with latter-day Top Gear was that however capable were the frontline presenters, only Chris Harris really knew and cared about his subject, which is also why he was the only person to survive the entire post-Clarkson era. But one was never going to be enough.
As you read this, the Waymo trials in London should be reaching their conclusion, meaning the self-driving taxi should soon become a reality on the streets of the capital. And in the interests of serving you, my dear reader, and not at all because I happened to be there and fancied a go, I have now tried it for myself on the streets of San Francisco.
It is of course utterly bizarre, but not perhaps for the reasons you might expect. Yes, it is in no way normal for a car to approach with your initials flashing out of a conning tower on its roof, only for you to climb aboard and find a steering wheel and pedals, but no one to operate them. There’s even a small area deep within your brain which identifies this as a highly hazardous environment from which you should distance yourself. That fear spikes when it calmly indicates and pulls out into fast flowing San Fran traffic.
“These three are deeply committed to their subject and happen to get on well”
But that’s not the strangest part of the experience. That comes about six minutes later when you’ve done the inevitable video of you gurning into your telephone while a car drives itself, and sent it to your family. Then you sit back and feel the tension leave your shoulders as you realise that, in this environment if no other, you’ve never been in the hands of a better driver. Soon you will appreciate you’ve never been in a car that’s driven in a mathematically straight line, not just in the middle lane, but in the middle of the middle lane, deviating by not a single centimetre to left or right. The way it feathers the brakes as you approach traffic lights is as good as the best chauffeur I have encountered, and makes the average Uber driver appear to be wearing concrete wellies. I didn’t want to get out.
There were some issues, mainly to do with where Waymo can and cannot go. But I will tell you this: I have never felt safer being driven by someone (or something) I don’t know. As a California-dwelling mate said to me, “It’s Waymo or walk,” and given what I witnessed, it is a sentiment with which I concur entirely.
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I have also been to see Ian Callum to join in the celebrations held to mark the 25th anniversary of the Aston Martin Vanquish, which he designed. I’ve known Ian longer even than that and I’m aware he rates the Vanquish among his finest works. But it’s not perfect, even in his eyes. While he styled it, he had to work around some hard points, one being the key that unlocked the door.
You would not think a mere key could affect the entire look of a car, but it can and, in this case, did. Ian’s original concept called for a much more tightly waisted car, to emphasise its Coke-bottle figure, but matters financial meant said key had to be an off-the-shelf item sourced from Aston’s then-parent, Ford. With the key came the key barrel which was so long that it torpedoed Ian’s original idea: “We had to redesign the entire side of the car.”
Ian now has his own design agency, Callum, and has taken the opportunity to redo his original design, this time without a board of directors saying, “You can’t do that.” There’s more power, a wider track, new wheels and a new treatment for both the front and rear of the car. He’s even got rid of the troublesome, finicky robotised gearbox and now offers a straight choice between manual and automatic.
A quarter of a century ago I thought the shape near unimprovable, but I was wrong. His renewed Vanquish (there will be 25) is better still. But the key? That remains because getting rid of it would have meant essentially redesigning the car from scratch. Sometimes even Britain’s greatest living car designer can’t have it all his own way.
