Slow down our rush to driverless cars

An experience in a latest cutting-edge tech luxury car reminded me why we need to be more cautious about a driverless future.

Whilst driving the Porsche Panamera 4S recently I was using the adaptive cruise control. Coming off on a tightly curved slip road, it detected a lorry and immediately slowed to match speed.

To gain a better view of what was ahead of the tall vehicle I moved slightly to the left. At that point the adaptive cruise control seemed to forget about the truck’s presence and accelerated towards it.

I waited till the last minute to slow back down to see if it would auto-brake. It didn’t.

To be fair, these were probably unique circumstances that caught out an otherwise excellent system.

But it says something about the Industry’s eager rush towards driverless cars doesn’t it?