Apple intends going into the business of making cars.

My take on this is that Apple is being very very stupid or blind. The motorcar as it has evolved is an incredibly complex device. I am not talking about the engine – it is more about the suspension, the drivetrain, passenger safety, durability, and so on.

Unless Apple gets into bed with a motorcar manufacturer, it is going to have to start at the beginning. This is not a good place to start. The other aspect that I should raise is that I have an iPad. I bought it so that I could receive emails when I am not in the office. It is the most frustrating device I have ever owned. Very often, the screen changes for unknown reasons. Sometimes I tap on the screen where I am supposed to tap and nothing happens. I loaded two videos onto the device and, two days later, they vanished (oh, no, I did not rent them; I bought them).

Let me not hesitate to point out that I do not own a smartphone, so, perhaps, I lack education. This is something that motor manufacturers know: even if a motorcar owner is very rich, he or she can still be stupid. Thus, the car must have all the things desired by a petrol head and still be operated by a person who is dimly aware that he or she is alive. It is difficult to believe that an Apple motorcar will be that simple.

We must not forget the example of USS Yorktown: this missile ship had a computer control system working on Windows NT. The system crashed and the ship was disabled for two days. This occurred in 1998, so, presumably, things have moved on. But the lesson to learn is that the US Navy, with all its engineering ability, did not have enough foresight to realise the ship on a computer is a bad idea (presumably, if the ship was controlled by an Apple computer, it would not have broken down but nobody would know how to steer it.)

On the subject of motorcars, fast approaching is the concept of the ‘driverless car’. There are lots of promises: the car will get you from A to B swiftly and seamlessly. Traffic flow will improve. Et cetera. In point of fact, the driverless car (in other words, a computer-controlled car) is even more stupid than running a missile ship on Windows NT.

Traffic flow is the only flow system that can have the same flow rate with the flow speed at different levels; for example, 5 000 cars per hour can either have an average speed of, say, 80 km/h or, say, 30 km/h. This is because the cars are further apart at the higher speed. Thus, if we consider our driverless car, we have to realise that there has to be a ‘safe default speed’ if the vehicle is operated outside certain parameters.

The ‘safe default speed’ is effectively zero. Thus, if the car is tootling along in traffic and a taxi comes up dangerously close, then the car will default to a standstill. This will back up traffic to a very slow sloth like crawl.

It is all very impressive showing a car parallel-parking automatically. At the same time, this is a very, very simple process. Using ultrasonic detection, the vehicle ‘knows’ the location of other vehicles and uses this information to parallel-park by means of a computer. Travelling down a highway at 120 km/h and having a computer to make lightning-fast decisions based on traffic flow is a very different thing. It is not impossible to do but it is impossible to anticipate the variability of what might happen. And for some of those inputs the car will slow down, thus causing extreme flow changes.

For aircraft, there have for a long time been automatic control systems. But this is because aircraft are separated at all times by at least 500', which is hardly the case for the motorcar. Where will Apple get to? Some of us remember the Apple I, a great computer for its time. Apple II was even greater. The first Macintosh – rubbish. We will certainly see.