What Will Happen When Autonomous Cars Take Over And Petrolheads Like Us Still Remain?

Face it, Google and Apple are making our lives difficult at the moment by helping to usher in the next generation of transportation: autonomy. Soon - in our generation, at least - we’ll be chauffeured around in a small glass case of no emotion while surfing the net on our 10G mobile phones. So what does that mean to petrolheads like us?

During a dinner last night with Ford bosses - I’m still at the Geneva motor show - we chatted about the matter and arrived at the answer: while there are still petrolheads in the world, there will be cars that can be driven, enjoyed, drifted and crashed. But how, if we’ll have to navigate around Google cars? Horses.

If you think about our big, four-legged friends 100 years ago, horses were a means of transportation. They’d pull carts from A to B, and created a haulage industry. Nowadays, however, horses aren’t used like a car, they’re used to have fun with, to go exploring on and to pursue a hobby.

And that’s exactly what’s going to happen to cars as we know and love them; sure, we’ll be banned from normal road driving in fun cars, but we’ll always have the race track to pursue our hobby (more of a lifestyle, really), burn rubber and spend the weekends amongst like-minded petrolheads.

So there you have it: our breed will be forced into a corner in the coming years, but there will always be petrolhead safe havens as long as we want them. Which we always will…

What are your thoughts on the subject?