Opinion

As computers and games consoles rapidly evolved in the 1990s from literally BASIC (as in the BBC Micro’s programming language) to the ultra-cool Sony PlayStation, so developers created some amazing racing games.

In 1991, Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix set new standards for an accurate Formula 1 simulator, then in 1997 Gran Turismo’s staggering realism and unprecedented scale changed the genre forever.

TOCA Touring Car Championship and Colin McRae Rally melded simulation with accessible dynamics and there were pure arcade classics such as Sega Rally Challenge, Daytona USA, Ridge Racer and Need for Speed.

But the greatest racing game of the decade – no, actually, the greatest racing game of all time – arrived on the Super Nintendo in 1992, featuring a cartoon plumber racing karts against rivals including a gorilla, a princess and a mushroom.

But underneath that cutesy cartoon froth, Super Mario Kart was a supreme racing title. Clearly, Super Mario Kart isn’t realistic in the style of Gran Turismo, but its faux-3D backdrops (enabled by the Super Nintendo’s parallax scrolling and Mode 7 graphics wizardry) were groundbreaking.

Even the technical limitations, such as the inability of the system to render 3D elevation, meant the track design had a simple purity that fancier, more capable games have since lost.

But it was in gameplay where Mario Kart excelled. The cartoon karts actually handled like karts. You had to hustle them, and unlocking true speed meant mastering the ‘jump drift’ technique to powerslide round corners. 

As a result, even Time Trial mode became a huge challenge. I maintain that my still-standing Attwood family lap record on Ghost Valley 1 is the nearest I’ll ever come to Ayrton Senna’s 1988 Monaco pole lap for in-the-zone driving transcendence.

And the racing modes were another area where Super Mario Kart absolutely shone. For starters, the various characters had different characteristics (Bowser had a high top speed but handled badly and was slow to accelerate; Koopa Troopa would zip off the line and round corners but lagged on long straights) that created a real balance.

Then there were the power-ups: the green and red shells, mushrooms, bananas and stars. Forget Balance of Performance or success ballast, this was the ultimate way to level the field: the lower down the order you were, the better power-ups you got.

Many times I would dominate a race, only for my brother to time a red shell strike to perfection and sweep past on the run to the line. Insanely frustrating and unfair, yet somehow we kept coming back for more.

There have been numerous Mario Kart titles on various Nintendo consoles (and now even mobile) since, but none has matched the simplicity and purity of the original. Nor has any other racing game.

And more than 30 years on, Super Mario Kart is still as enjoyable to play as it ever was.

Anyone up for a showdown on Rainbow Road?

When is a car company not a car company? There are a couple of paths into this way of thinking.

One – and this is among my least favourite topics, but I suppose we must delve into it – is the idea that car makers are gradually becoming software companies that just happen to also make cars. Eek.

Volvo’s Jim Rowan, several weeks ago uninvited from being Volvo’s Jim Rowan, spoke positively about this trend in March.

He talked of ‘cloud architecture’ and ‘full-stack software’ and, I know, I know, I should actually understand what those things mean and what the implications of them are, but even though I’m skinny and bald and my spectacles are thin-rimmed, I’m just not tech bro enough to get my head around it all.

Software is essential: I do understand that much. And I get that if a car can talk to other cars and a base some distance away, if it can send and receive reports on incidents and accidents, that will make for safer and easier journeys. But as a driver/owner/user, I don’t need to know and honestly don’t care how any of this is happening.

Then there are the user-facing parts of software, which I do care about and which some important people clearly believe are going to be deciding factors in what defines their company’s characteristics and what separates it from a competitor.

I think the user interface and user experience are really important, but I also don’t buy into the theory that software will define a car company.

I used to put this down to the fact that I’m increasingly an old man yelling at clouds, but the more I hear from younger drivers, the more I think they feel the same way. There’s only so much software you can use in a car. I just don’t believe people are going to fall in love with a car brand because it has the best software.

It’s not like shopping for furniture or the choicest ingredients to make a great dinner. There I’ll pick my favourite things. I don’t, though, have a favourite shopping website, which is what car software most reminds me of: it’s not a thing in itself but a conduit to get to a thing.

I just want the easiest conduit, the least bad version, something that works every time and is deliberately designed to be unannoying. 

For me, this is the optimum that user-facing car software can be. I’m not convinced it’s enough reason alone to buy a car, although I am 100% sure that it’s enough reason to not buy one. Does that amount to the same thing?

Which brings me to part two of how not to be a car company: for want of a less cringey phrase, be a lifestyle company.

In the past month, I’ve driven new cars from, and spoken to the bosses of, Rolls-Royce and Morgan. They’re different companies in that one makes uber-luxury limos and the other makes driver-focused sports cars, but in so many ways they’re the same.

They sell you a beautiful object and also an experience, and while both make cars, a buyer isn’t necessarily contemplating a new vehicle as an alternative place to put their money.

Anything from an old Land Rover to a house extension or a boat or a small island is a rival to what these companies make.

From time to time, I think about buying an old Caterham. Competing for my money is not what one would consider a direct Caterham rival but an Indian motorcycle or a new greenhouse.

Rolls-Royce, Morgan, Caterham: these are luxury companies as much as car companies, and that’s a formula that does work. It requires no reinvention and no trying to convince buyers that they should want something they’ve never wanted before. 

And as and when new tech or new interfaces are needed, companies and buyers want them to be as stable and unintrusive as is possible.

Of these two car-making-but-not-car-company approaches, I know which I find more compelling and whose cars I would ultimately rather spend more time in.

It’s the ones that let me feel and enjoy the tangible, dynamic parts of vehicle technology and otherwise leave me alone.

Autocar is fast filling up with mentions of ‘software-defined vehicles’ – cars whose performance and functionality is primarily defined electronically rather than physically.

The computing power of the car becomes its ruling characteristic and the software for it can be improved and updated time and again, so that it’s never finished, rather in a constant state of flux.

The car industry is predictably excited about this idea. I suspect that any customers who have ever had an over-the-air software update go a bit wrong won’t be quite so keen.

As for me, I’m a bit puzzled how manufacturers can seriously be contemplating giving software an even greater role in the cars they will make in years to come while at least some of them are doing such an awful job with the stuff they’re making in 2025.

I’m not sure that the new Jaecoo 7 counts as an SDV, but it has certainly inspired something of a software-defined verdict. Honestly, this car is like some cautionary parable of terrible, dystopian motoring yet to come.

The 7 is the latest mid-sized SUV to arrive on the UK market from China. It’s made by the country’s fourth-largest manufacturer, Chery. It looks a bit like a Range Rover Velar that has been made on the bones of something slightly shorter. In a very broad-brush, box-ticky kind of way, it drives well enough.

You can get petrol and plug-in hybrid versions, and the latter proved to be quite refined and efficient, with predictable and obedient handling and ride comfort that, while a bit restless and wooden, is far from offensive.

None of that matters much, though, because the car’s software is so bad, affects so much and ultimately, by making you question the integrity of the wider design and engineering of the car simply by association, undermines the whole product. It’s a farce. Jaecoo’s digital deficiencies come at you gradually and so corrosively.

The first that bubbled up for me was the trip computer. The 7 doesn’t actually have a conventional trip computer but instead records rolling 50km indications of efficiency, specific to both its hybrid and electric operating modes.

The trouble is that the indications are wildly, comically inaccurate. The hybrid-mode ‘trip’ seems to get stuck at 60mpg or is incapable of displaying anything higher, while the electric-mode one regularly skyrockets beyond 1000mpkWh. You can’t believe or trust either of them. They’re like the Jay and Silent Bob of the automotive instrumentation niche.

Next, I noticed that the battery meter didn’t seem to be, well, metered right. The ‘gauge’ (it’s a digital pretend one, obviously) never seems to slip below about 20%. At that point, the battery is deemed empty and the car switches into hybrid mode.

So why tell me there’s still about eight miles of electric range left if you’re only prepared to let me access it once I’ve unearthed the surprise EV+ driving mode, which comes with a warning message that it should only be enabled “in emergency situations”?

Why not just pretend it isn’t there at all until I actually need it? And then poof: “You seem to have run out of fuel, sir. Could I interest you in eight electric bonus miles?”

Then there’s the risible calibration of the driver assistance systems, which are intrusive enough to move you to violence. There are the ventilation controls and primary touchscreen navigation bar, which disappear when you connect your phone to Apple CarPlay.

And there’s the wider touchscreen itself, which looks like a budget-brand tablet computer that has been unceremoniously plonked on the dashboard and isn’t any less distracting to use than that would suggest. Finally, there’s the odometer.

The simplest line of code in the car, you would think. How could anyone get that wrong? For some unfathomable reason, the 7’s only counts miles covered in hybrid mode. Seriously. Well, electric-powered ones don’t really wear out the tyres and brakes, do they?

And you’re not obliged to admit to them at resale time, either, are you…?

A while back, someone made the case on this website for cars with no digital screens. We look at screens all day anyway, and they’re distracting and just plain lazy design, the author posited.

The author in question was, er… me. So allow me to set the record straight by disagreeing with myself.

Yes, car makers’ screen addictions have got out of hand and I enjoy the zen of simple cars, but for the vast majority of mainstream cars, touchscreens are essential to harnessing the inherent complexity and something that customers want.

The Ineos Grenadier demonstrates as much: its interior looks like the flight deck of an airliner. You know, the things that require multiple years of study and training to learn how to operate.

I firmly believe that certain essential, often-used functions should ideally be controlled by physical buttons, like the interior temperature, seats and useless mandatory driver assistance features.

But the tyre pressure reset, the setting for deciding whether the speedo should be in miles or kilometres, the equaliser for the audio? It’s stuff you adjust once and then forget about, so a screen is perfect for them.

Remember those separate single-DIN equaliser units with sliders in ’80s and ’90s cars? What a waste of space those were.

When sensibly implemented, touchscreens can make a limited amount of dashboard space much more useful by giving the driver quick and easy access to a multitude of functions while keeping the peripheral stuff out of sight.

The classic BMW iDrive rotary controller is brilliant for scrolling through menus or zooming in and out on the sat-nav map, so it makes an ideal partner to a well-laid-out screen, but trying to enter an address with it is excruciating. 

A touchscreen does that much better. Unlike some, I don’t think touchscreens are inherently dangerous to use in a moving car. Some of them definitely are, and there should also be standards for the response time and reliability of these things, because there’s nothing more distracting than ineffectually prodding at a dead or – possibly worse – nearly dead touchscreen.

But if the hardware can keep up and the menus are sensibly laid out, with big icons, simple graphics and a clear sense of prioritisation that puts important stuff permanently on screen, touchscreens can be great.

Apple CarPlay has been a game-changer, because it lets you safely control music and podcasts. And the dinner-plate touchscreen in new Minis, for all its faults, is a great reinvention of an old styling cue and feels like an extension of the brand.

Touchscreens are a sort of superpower for interior designers. But in the same way that Spider-Man falls off the odd roof in his early days and is occasionally tempted to use his powers for evil, car makers need to learn to find a balance.

Just as I watched the last episode of Reacher and feared my television well was running dry, a new series of Bosch: Legacy arrived to make going to the gym less boring.

So begins another series in which the star bounds around saving the day, breaking a few rules/laws/bones as necessary, and ultimately gets paid badly or not at all for their trouble.

I wondered if it was just people like me who were drawn to this sort of story, but whether it’s Buffy or Ludwig, Harry Potter or Stranger Things, plus about eleventy-dozen superhero films, the theme is the same.

See also basically everything from The Littlest Hobo to James Bond. It’s a massively popular genre. Fact is, loads of us like a central character who’s not perfect but who knows what it takes to get things done and, once it’s all over, gets hardly any recognition.

Is this because it’s how we see, or would like to see, ourselves? Does it reflect our own personalities, even if our struggles are against jobsworths, unfair parking fines and computers saying no, rather than criminal masterminds? (I mean, same difference, right?)

And if that’s the case, I wonder whether that’s why, as many of us do, I find myself drawn to a certain kind of car: something a bit quirky, made by an underdog, probably not the best car around but, for all its failings, something with charm. A car with noble intentions, if such a thing is possible.

At the moment, I’m going through a phase of being asked what good cars I’ve driven recently. There have been a number of very respectable, very efficient and extremely effective ones.

And when it comes to the moment of answering, I often can’t remember a single one of them. I can, though, remember most of the miles I’ve driven in, say, a Noble M600, an Ineos Grenadier or a Morgan. Even a Citroën Ami. Or my own Audi A2 or old Land Rover Defender.

These cars are all flawed or compromised in some way or another (within reason: they haven’t murdered anyone for the greater good), but I find them more compelling than the squeaky clean, goody two-shoes, far more accomplished alternatives. Steve Cropley’s new Jeep Wrangler is another case in point.

I don’t just mean it’s possible to like bad cars. It is, of course, but that’s a different conversation that usually involves nostalgia. What I mean is that there’s an attraction to the underappreciated, to a character that’s trying to do a good thing against difficult odds.

The film reviewer (and classic Ford owner) Mark Kermode says he would rather a film set out to achieve something noble and miss its mark than achieve its goal of being blandly efficient.

One might think differently about cars, I suppose, when you have to live with one for three years and  e confident it will be worth something afterwards, rather than just bearing with it for two hours, so from a reviewing perspective, our approaches may remain a little different.

But I do think there is a virtuousness, a pleasing honesty, about a core of people who set out to give a car really positive traits, so that the result doesn’t look like it was designed and engineered by endless committees.

And isn’t there something endearing about a flawed character? Some gratification in recognising a positive trait that we don’t think everybody else sees?

Maybe appreciating these things is the same as preferring a slightly rickety but pleasingly proportioned old house to a brilliantly insulated new one whose floors are level but which has no aesthetic charm.

We know that the one that works properly is better, but we would prefer something that is in some ways – how to put it delicately? – a bit more crap.

By cheering on the underappreciated underdog, it positively reaffirms that we have a kindness of understanding, plus it makes us believe we have the nous and intellect to see what others might have missed. In other words, it makes us feel a bit good about ourselves.

On the telly, those strings are pulled by design. In automotive terms, I suspect it’s more accidental. But the net effect can be similar.

Is strident, pragmatic, long-distance motoring now enjoying its Concorde moment? Is it all downhill from here? Having just returned from the Alps in something a bit special, I fear it might well be.

I’ve loved big, car-based escapades ever since thrashing a mate’s Peugeot 206 down to Arezzo as a 17-year-old. It croaked on arrival (head gasket!) and we spent a king’s ransom in roaming charges chatting to the IRA, never mind the repair work. (I notice the RAC’s Italy Roadside Assistance has at some point since 2006 rebranded to Roadside Assistance Italy). But it was a hell of a lot of fun.

Of course, Peugeot didn’t engineer the 206 1.6 GLX with crushing cross-continental ability in mind, as demonstrated by the car’s measly 90bhp, seats flatter than the straight at Ehra-Lessien and a gearbox serving up 4000rpm at 80mph in top (the GLX did, thank goodness, get air-con).

But other cars are forged for this sort of activity, and it’s these I’ll mourn when their time is up. Chuffing great diesel, huge boot, soft chairs with canyon-deep bolsters intended not for hard cornering but for hour-upon-hour comfort on the straights, a big tank: the ideal tools for touring.

For obvious reasons, if not always the right ones, plush diesel wagons are dying out, and it’s hard to envisage superior touring apparatus in an electric future. Not until solid-state battery tech is here, at least. In the meantime, it will be the Concorde phenomenon.

That airliner that could whisk you from London to New York in three hours, but since it was retired in 2003 the same flight has taken eight. Okay, this was never a serious issue for humanity, only one of minor convenience for the lucky few, but it still stung, because it was the killing off of technology that made an arduous task a lot easier. And cooler.

The parallel is that, in 15 years, when I still hope to be getting lost in Europe en voiture, I doubt any contemporary product is going to be as competent as the one that represents Concorde in this little analogy: Mercedes’ E450d Estate – all £90k of it. (See also Alpina’s D3 Touring and the Audi S6 Avant, although the Merc is better than either as an all-rounder.)

It is the apogee of long-range personal transit, yet extinction beckons because diesel has become so unfashionable.

While such cars remain, our duty is to revel in them. Having fluked the perfect wheels, I did just that on this Alpine road trip. Fluked? Once we had sorted travel dates, I opened the road test diary. It reaches further into the future than you might think, mapping out when the main tests in the mag will run.

Sometimes a juicy candidate materialises at short notice and we scramble to fit it in, but mostly it’s all planned. Cue a shiver of delight on seeing that the oil-burning Merc’s test window tallied with this trip.

Forget MIRA: this would be real-life graft. A consumer test beasting. We even found some winter Continentals, their luridly tall sidewalls promising even greater comfort.

Alas, my wife wanted to ease the journey out to Switzerland with an overnight stop. Wanting to fully tap into the Merc’s touring credentials, I was in camp ‘one hit’.

So I drew her attention to the quilted seats, and assured her the mightiest non-AMG E really is as quiet as a Range Rover at 70mph (I didn’t crack out the road test data).

And it did the trick. Result: 600 miles and an early start, with the concession that we would use the tunnel – these days ‘LeShuttle’ – to cross to France. It’s the rational approach if you need to beat a path deep into Europe on day one. On a weekday, you can even rocket from junction 11a of the M20 to the train itself in 20 minutes, which is miraculous considering the ferry alternative.

And the E450d itself? Just under 2.9 litres of capacity, 1555rpm at 80mph in ninth, 553lb ft (!) at 1350rpm and a 73-litre tank. Four-wheel drive too. That this car would fulfil its mission despite wintry conditions and without needing to refuel was never in doubt.

That said, having averaged 46.5mpg at a steady 75mph, my patience only lasted as far as Troyes. Thereafter we went a lot quicker, before the final, twisting drag up and up and up into the mountains, taken hastily in anticipation of that first icy pilsner.

And guess what? It still averaged 43.4mpg. That translates to an all-out range of 700 hasty miles – ie fill and forget. It may as well have been nuclear-powered.

You have to love that, although it’s not only the diesel frugality: it’s the opulence, the brutish turn of pace, the capacity to rival an HGV’s and the polished ride. Hybrids just aren’t as capable. And EVs? Pfft.

So yes, the E450d Estate is serious money, but a seat on Concorde was never cheap. 

The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi is difficult, or impossible if you ask some Japanese people, to precisely define. But I have Google and all the false confidence of a mediocre, middle-aged, Western white man, so here we go.

Loosely, it’s an aesthetic that values imperfection and transience. Andrew Juniper, a furniture maker and author of the book Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence, says “it’s an aesthetic that finds beauty in things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete”.

Tanehisa Otabe, professor at Tokyo University’s Institute of Aesthetics, told the BBC in 2020 that “wabi-sabi leaves something unfinished or incomplete for the play of imagination”.

It is, then, one of a number of Japanese idioms that references an appreciation for or wistfulness towards impermanence. Not dissimilarly, the concept of mono no aware translates to “the pathos of things” or “a sensitivity to ephemera”.

This brings me to the current and soon to be not-current Nissan GT-R, the R35 generation, which is about to end a fairly astonishing 18-year production run. That’s a timeline which is anything but fleeting by automotive standards: cherry blossom, blooming and dying quickly, it is not.

But in its more recent years, there can only have been an awareness of the R35’s mortality. At the start of its life, we called it “the world’s cleverest car” and Japanese engineers told us it was comparable to a craftsperson-made Swiss watch.

But as time has gone on and its annual model-year revisions have slowed, its once-spectacular power outputs have been dwarfed and its Nürburgring lap times eclipsed.

Already it’s off sale in many markets, including the UK, where it no longer meets the latest safety or emissions regulations, and within months it will go out of production entirely. There is no imminent replacement.

And that, I get the impression, is fine by the Japanese. I could be wrong, of course. They could be more cross than a teacher after you’ve knocked on the staffroom door at breaktime. 

But I don’t think so. Two-thirds of Japanese identify as Buddhists and that doctrine says that all existence is “transient, evanescent, inconstant”. There is an appreciation that things come and go.

So while there’s existential angst here that Jaguar doesn’t currently build sports cars and the idea of Ford without a Mustang or Porsche without a 911 is basically unthinkable, some time without a new GT-R should almost be expected. Appreciated.

Similarly, you could consider the Honda NSX, which spent years out of production between generations and has been deliberately unusual in all its forms. Rotary-engined Mazdas likewise.

Or even the Lexus LFA, which perhaps was a successor to the Toyota 2000GT, spiritually if not literally. All came, all went. Will we see replacements? Probably. But who knows?

Nissan promises it will make a new GT-R, it should be said. “I want to have four or five cars at the top of our portfolio that are really brand-oriented, cars that really represent what Nissan is about and show what the heartbeat of Nissan is,” incoming CEO Ivan Espinosa told us recently.

And there are practical reasons too for the absence of an immediate GT-R replacement: Nissan isn’t actually run by people who treat managing a business like a seasonal hobby.

There are, or were, honchos there, Westerners typically, who found very clever budgetary ways to make sure the Z made it into production as a direct, immediate replacement for the 370Z (by underneath being an awful lot like it).

If Nissan were to make a petrol replacement for the GT-R now, it could end up unable to sell it in all the places it would like to – especially if its life cycle approaches two decades again.

“And these cars should go everywhere in the world,” says Espinosa. Yet if it were electric,  as previewed in 2023’s Hyper Force concept, today’s batteries would place limits on both how many laps of the Nordschleife it could do and how many people would buy one. Consumers, as I understand it, are not beating down doors to get hold of electric driver’s cars.

What the new GT-R will become, then, is still to be decided. The current one is out of place, out of time and about to be out of production. And that, we should appreciate, is fine.

I’ve done plenty of very high speeds on Horiba MIRA’s ‘twin horizontal’ straights, but rarely quite like this.

The Bentley Continental GT Speed Hybrid that I recently road tested took me to the far side of 170mph several times, back and forth in opposite directions, all within the bounds of a measured mile, while simultaneously massaging my rather spoiled and considerable posterior.

I didn’t ask it to; I just forgot to turn that particular seat function off. And, well, there can’t be many cars that could have done both.

The irony was that the optional massage seats weren’t in fact switched on. Instead, I was experiencing what Crewe calls ‘postural adjustment’, fitted as standard and designed to relieve the load on your backside over a long journey.

You can read all about this latest Bentley in a six-page test in a few weeks’ time. Suffice to say, for now, that the Continental GT Speed is indeed a worthy purveyor of the brand’s inimitable and characteristically enveloping, cosseting, thunderously fast and pervasively special grand touring experience.

All 2462kg and 772bhp of it, replete as the car is now with a V8-engined plug-in hybrid powertrain that should keep it relevant for years to come.

And being a PHEV capable of electric-only running at one moment and then switching to the piston-powered kind within an instant, the next thing it made me wonder was: which is actually quieter?

Isn’t the answer obvious? Ultimately, yes. But the size of the decisive margin might still surprise you. There is certainly a bit of a myth abroad that any car capable of electric running must be quieter and more refined than any that isn’t and that EVs are all whisper-quiet.

When you break out the noise meter and record what’s actually going on, the truth turns out to be a fair bit more complicated.

All of Autocar’s cabin noise testing is done on the MIRA mile straights – the same surface where our benchmark acceleration numbers are generated. So while the test conditions on the day can vary, we keep the input factors as constant as we can.

In the new Continental GT Speed, running at a steady 50mph with the engine off, the meter fluctuated around 61.7dBA – but then rose to only around 62.2dBA with the engine running.

It’s as confounding to read it again now as it was to observe it first hand, because your ears aren’t lying to you.

You can hear the instant the engine starts and easily perceive the difference it makes to the cabin’s ambient noise level, even when it’s only bumbling along just above idle – and then you look down at a meter that might as well be shrugging its shoulders and saying ‘meh’, like some uninterested adolescent.

The Continental GT Speed is a modern luxury car of particularly high standards for mechanical noise isolation, needless to say. In the average PHEV, we could probably expect a greater disparity.

Nevertheless, in any car moving along at a 50mph cruising speed, the greatest individual source of detectable cabin noise usually isn’t the engine, even when there is one fitted. Road noise and wind noise are already more prominent. 

And here are some numbers to prove it. The Mercedes-Benz EQS is an exceptionally quiet car, for example, generating just 58dBA of cabin noise at 50mph, but that will have a lot more to do with the fact that it’s a £130,000 luxury Mercedes than simply an electric car.

At the same speed, Cupra’s Tavascan EV is producing 61dBA of cabin noise – but so is the Dacia Duster Hybrid.

The BMW 120 M Sport generates a very respectable 62dBA and the new petrol Audi S5 only 63dBA, yet the Kia EV6 and Audi Q6 E-tron – electric both – each generates 65dBA.

It’s something to think about if you imagine that adopting an EV will automatically be something your eardrums will thank you for. They might – but only if you buy the right one.

Nissan has now finished testing autonomous cars on UK roads, as its EvolvAD project has come to a close – the last part of an eight-year scheme.

This bit was to see whether a self-driving Nissan Leaf could operate outside of cities and in less connected areas, on residential and single-track country roads, to discover what types of technology will be necessary to drive in such complex environments.

Nissan says the trial has been “tremendously successful”, but you may note that there aren’t autonomous cars serving your neighbourhood yet. Over eight years, autonomous Leafs have driven 16,000 miles over all kinds of terrain. You may also note that doesn’t sound very far.

Autonomous cars are still a long way away, then. And it’s unclear whether they’re viable at all and whether we will ever get there. If you’ve driven a car with any assisted driving technology, you will know how hopeless it can be.

But, but, but. To remind us why it’s doing it, Nissan put a 93-year-old in one of these cars and had it drive him around to show what it could do.

Because while autonomous technology might take the weight off while it drives you to work, more importantly it can also be used to keep mobile the people who need it most – those who can’t drive themselves.

People lament losing personal mobility, their ability to drive, because it gets really expensive when they can’t, and that’s because employing drivers is the expensive bit in any commercial road transport. I have a local bus service that operates limited hours and has to be underwritten by the council for that reason.

So if it costs even, say, £300,000 to equip a vehicle with autonomous driving technology, if the vehicle operates all the time and the technology replaces several drivers, it will pay for itself quickly.

The prospect of self-driving vehicles is bad news for professional drivers. But for people who need to get around, who can’t drive, who can’t get to a bus and who can’t afford taxis, it could make the difference between staying in a home or community they love or being carted off to a home less dignified.

It can make independence more affordable, more viable. And for that reason, it’s worth seeing if it will work.