You wouldn’t fly in an airplane that doesn’t have people in the cockpit – the same goes for self-driving cars

THE UK is the first country in Europe to legalize hands-free self-driving cars.

The technology has been standard equipment in Ford’s new Mustang Mach E for some time, but it went “live” at midnight on Wednesday. So now you only pay £17.99 a month and you can relax.

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Unless you can’t. By law, you actually have to sit in the driver’s seat and pay attention.

There are even sensors constantly monitoring your eyes to make sure you’re looking carefully at where you’re going.

Ford calls the system “Blue Cruise” — which sounds like something Cunard might offer to swingers — and says it’s been working fine in America for months.

They say 193,000 customers have clocked up a combined 64 million miles and so far there hasn’t been a single accident.

Human error

That’s great, I’m sure, but America isn’t like Britain.

First off, there are no double mini-roundabouts, and most of the streets are so wide you could hop around for an hour and still not hit anything.

This is not the case in the UK.

Thankfully, the Ford system is only a tier two device.

This means the vehicle can control steering and speed and nothing else.

But tinkerers are already hard at work on level five full automation, which they think will allow the driver to set the destination and then go to sleep.

Yes. Just as one could fall asleep when there is a lion in the room.

There is another problem with these fully autonomous cars.

Because sure, if the groceries are running low, you can send him into town and tell him where to park.

But what then? Can’t really go to the store to buy milk and eggs.

You have to do this, which means you have to be there.

And if you need to be there, you can do the driving too. It is not that hard.

Even James May can do it.

Of course, fans of the technology say it will remove human error from the road network.

But wait a minute, because are they saying humans are less reliable than apps?

Even if you think electronics are safer than people, let me ask you that.

The vast majority of plane crashes are caused by pilot error. This is a known fact.

It is also a well-known fact that airplanes nowadays are quite capable of taking off, flying and landing all by themselves.

So statistically it makes sense to get rid of the pilots.

But would you get on a plane that didn’t have people in the cockpit?
Me neither.

A NEW poll has found half of Britons support repatriation scheme to Rwanda. But don’t think it has a working prayer.

Of course not. This government cannot even fix a simple problem like potholes or fly tipping over.

Last year, a million incidents were recorded, but somehow only 2,000 led to legal action.

So if it can’t fix this stuff, what chance does it have of filling planes with immigrants and convincing them to head off to a happy new life in the sun?

CALL IN CHOP-A SQUAD

SIR Starmer announced this week that if he won the next election, half of the food bought by the public sector would be homegrown.

Hmmm. I’m afraid he’ll have trouble reaching that goal, because research by Farmers Weekly magazine – my new bible – has found that foods labeled British are often not British at all.

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And that it didn’t meet our safety standards either.

They found that a major food manufacturer is churning out tens of thousands of tons of foreign pork as domestic pork every week.

And that it has ended up on the shelves of Tesco, Co-op, Morrisons, M&S, Sainsburys and Aldi.

Luckily, this country has a Food Crime Unit.

So folks, write down your new guidelines on pronouns and fire up the Quattro. There is work to be done.

And heads that have to roll.

PLANE ODD BY BIDEN

CRITICISM have indicated that Joe Biden made it very clear on his trip to Ireland this week that he is not a big fan of the UK.

How do you know?

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I’ve listened to every speech and utterance by the US President and it was almost impossible to figure out what he meant.

He definitely said something about dogs. Or maybe it was Moor. Or logs. And then he shook hands with a potted plant.

All I know is that after landing on Air Force One, he emerged from the cargo door.

Why? Did he travel down there, or are the stairs from the main cabin too difficult for him these days?

Britain facing a beaver invasion? Dam!

THE big fur beaver is back. And already it can be out of control.

A Welsh couple set up a trap camera to find out who or what was ruining the trees in their garden and were amazed to find the culprit was a beaver.

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Animal lovers conducting carefully controlled experiments to bring the rodent back to our shores say none have escaped.

Which means this one lives in the wild.

Some would say this is good news. Beavers are very good at managing river banks.

But others feel that things can quickly get out of hand on their own.

I once spoke to a Chilean guy who told me that the government built a fence to try and stop a million-strong army of Argentine beavers from ravaging their forests. Did it work?

“No,” he said. “They ate the fence.”

BRYN A £260m HERO

IN 2006 I received news that Ben Parkinson, a young paratrooper from my hometown of Doncaster, had been seriously injured by an anti-tank mine in Afghanistan.

He had lost three limbs and was in a coma, but his mother asked if I could come and talk to him as he had always been a Top Gear fan.

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So I went to Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham and I just couldn’t understand why the wounded soldiers were there in a general ward surrounded by damn old bats and racists.

We sent these guys into battle and it was immediately clear that we didn’t have the right facilities to take care of them if they got hurt.

I was horrified, but I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do about it.

Fortunately, however, there was another man who shared my concerns.

He was a graphic artist named Bryn Parry and along with his wife Emma he knew what to do.

He set up a charity called Help for Heroes with the aim of raising £5million to modernize the facilities at the Armed Forces Rehabilitation Center in Surrey.

He went above and beyond and soon his charity had raised a staggering £260million.

However, this week Bryn passed away and I just want to say that.

He devoted much of his life to helping heroes, but he was probably the greatest hero of them all.

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