Cars

When you buy a house in Britain, there is an extensive and well-established series of checks you must perform to ensure the property is suitable for habitation. When undertaking a survey, you should ensure that the boundaries of the property conform to those recorded at the Land Registry, and that the property does not lie on a flood plain or risk structural damage from coastal erosion or subsidence. Unfortunately, there seems to be no mechanism to protect householders from the worst possible eventuality — which is to find out that you have a lawyer living next door. Wherever you have a shared wall or fence, there exist countless opportunities to

All too often in life there’s a gap between expectation and reality. Not with driving on ice. The expectation is tantalising, but the reality is demanding, exhilarating, and so much fun you’re surprised it’s legal. I’ve been doing it for 13 years, taking groups of around 15 on an annual trip to Sweden. Every single time it’s an absolute joy to witness the hilarity, thrills and sense of satisfaction that our guests enjoy in just three days. We start each visit with a little bit of theory for the technically minded — though nothing really prepares you for driving on a frozen lake. The fundamental skill to master is how

On the face of it, there’s something quite appealing about driverless cars. It will be like having a chauffeur-driven chariot at your beck and call, except it will be no more expensive than owning a car. Indeed, it might well be-cheaper because you’ll be less likely to have an accident, so insurance premiums will be lower, and it will use fuel more efficiently. Not only that, but we’re told journey times will be shorter because driverless cars don’t need to keep more than a few inches apart, thereby reducing congestion. And they’ll be quicker still if the inner-cities are reserved for driverless cars only. No need for traffic lights, roundabouts

Two books to recommend to my fellow transportation nerds: Travel Fast or Smart? A Manifesto for an Intelligent Transport Policy by David Metz, formerly chief boffin at the Department for Transport; and Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain Has No Transport Policy by Christian Wolmar. The first is excellent throughout, the second is excellent right up to the final pages when, as many British transport commentators are liable to do, Wolmar rhapsodises about European approaches to city planning with their ‘bicycle superhighways’ and, yes, those bloody trams. You know the kind of thing: ‘In the Norwegian port of Slartibartfast, all cars are banned from the city centre before midnight, and the

In many ways a satnav is a miraculous device. A network of US military satellites more than 10,000 miles above the surface of the Earth, each broadcasting a signal with little more power than a 100-watt light bulb, allows a device in your satnav or mobile phone to triangulate your location on the ground to within seven yards or so. The system is so finely tuned that the clocks aboard the satellites must be calibrated to run 38 microseconds a day slower than Earth time to correct for the effects of general and special relativity. This allows your phone to know your location and, after factoring in real-time traffic information,

A first last week: a Google driverless car in autonomous mode was partly at fault in a collision, interestingly one involving a bus. The car was merging into a lane of faster-moving traffic to dodge a pile of sandbags in a collapsed drain and nudged in ahead of the bus on the assumption that its driver would give way. He didn’t. I suspect this may be a failure of social intelligence. Human drivers, for all their faults, can intuitively read the behaviour of other road users very well. We instinctively know that bus drivers are less likely to give way than car drivers. Understanding humans is always going to be