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Following on from my views regarding the testing of driverless cars on public roads I’ve just read a piece on the likely changes to legislation that will be necessary. But before I get to that I have a couple of questions of my own. First of all what will be the eventual cost of one of these driverless cars?

Thinking of a change but unsure as to the best way to finance your car? Then you need a copy of my car finance book, Car Finance – A Simple Guide by Graham Hill. Click on the link below to buy the best car finance book on the market, available as a Kindle Book and Paper Back.

We know that electric cars have been a dismal failure. Very few people have taken them, not least because when you replace a traditional engine with an electric motor and install a big battery it adds, on average, £10,000 to the cost of the car. So with all the technology needed to replace a driver will they cost circa £100,000 or am I missing something? And why?

Why do I want to be in the driver’s seat of a driverless car? I actually quite enjoy driving and although I am about to replace my current car with the same car but the latest model, I’m getting excited. Can’t see me getting excited over a car I won’t be driving, a bit like getting excited over getting in a taxi. Will they reduce congestion? No, if anything more cars will appear on the roads.

Will they make the roads safer? I don’t think so. Communism is a great concept with everyone being treated equally but it can’t work as long as human beings have desires, aspirations and the basic need to be better than the next bloke. And so with driverless cars, they will only make roads safer if every driver has one.

Many pundits have suggested that driverless cars will provide ‘full business mobility’. People will be able to hold meetings in cars and work as they travel from A to B. What a load of tosh! Have they not heard of public transport, airplanes and chauffeurs? Improve public transport, especially trains and make it possible to travel to London from just outside Brighton without having to stand all the way in a carriage that uses an open window as a means of air conditioning.

Moving on to legislation? Does entering into the car’s control system the data needed to calculate the destination and speed make you a ‘driver’ and do you therefore need a licence? As I understand it some cars will be ‘highly automated’ whilst others will be ‘fully automated’, will both require a driving licence or just the highly automated vehicles?

If you need a licence to drive a highly automated vehicle one must assume that you could be convicted if caught using a mobile phone, eating at the wheel and not wearing a seatbelt. God forbid that you are caught drunk as a skunk in a driverless car, will you be convicted of drunk driving? For me the whole idea of driverless cars is a nonsense. But then I would have probably thought that you couldn’t improve on a horse and cart. I’ll get my coat! By Graham Hill

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Telematics is a fairly new word that started its life within the terminology used by fleet managers wishing to track drivers of their vans to ensure that drivers were not driving too many hours and using the most economic routes. It normally takes the form of a tracking device that records everything from time spent driving to the routes taken by the driver, fuel consumption and even the driving style of the driver.

Thinking of a change but unsure as to the best way to finance your car? Then you need a copy of my car finance book, Car Finance – A Simple Guide by Graham Hill. Click on the link below to buy the best car finance book on the market, available as a Kindle Book and Paper Back.

The process was intended to improve driver safety, improve efficiency and ensure that the driver was involved in as few accidents as possible. But these days the same technology has moved into the consumer market with insurance companies prepared to give discounts to drivers who fit telematics type systems to their cars providing greater discounts to those who drive least and most carefully.

But this has led to legal questions about what data is provided and how it is used. Basic tracking information used for health and safety or economic reasons may be all well and good but what about the times when the company vehicle is being used for personal use and if information is fed to your insurer when is the data likely to cross over into an infringement of personal privacy?

Marc Dautlich, head of information law and partner in the technology, media and telecoms team at international law firm Pinsent Masons, believes employers using such technology need to tread very carefully. It is also believed that Insurers and those collecting data on their behalf need to be equally cautious. Legal issues stem from data protection and employment law, as well as article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, under which an individual has a right to ‘respect for one’s private and family life, home and correspondence.’

Not only could telematics systems leave drivers vulnerable to the miss-use of data but as cars now have access to the likes of Google, Facebook, Emails and your mobile address book how is the information that may be stored in your car protected? I reported quite recently about the case of a celebrity’s wife selling her car and the new owner finding the previous owners phone list still stored in the car’s memory, including the home and mobile numbers of numerous famous people.

There are many advantages to having telematics fitted to your car, especially when proving a driver’s speed just prior to an accident but this could all fall apart if data is found to be miss-used by employers or insurance companies. Anyone using the data collected must make it clear to the driver what information will be collected, how it will be used and how long it will be kept for. By Graham Hill

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• Do You Really Want Your Insurer Monitoring Your Driving Habits? (cheapautoinsurance.org)

I’m a bit of a guru when it comes to Internet dating. I’ve had a lot of successes and a few disasters but in the meantime a lot of fun! Internet dating is the second best thing ever invented behind chocolate and I am fortunate enough to have dated women from all backgrounds and ethnicities both young and old (mainly young – what?).

Thinking of a change but unsure as to the best way to finance your car? Then you need a copy of my car finance book, Car Finance – A Simple Guide by Graham Hill. Click on the link below to buy the best car finance book on the market, available as a Kindle Book and Paper Back.

My last serious girlfriend was from the Philippines and in her 20’s. We met online and chatted for a year before we started dating and we dated for around a year. It was great. I met her on Plenty of Fish, a great free dating website, however I wouldn’t meet her today because the Canadian owner has decided that you can only chat to women (or men) plus or minus 14 years of your age.

How ridiculous is that? Women on dating sites can ignore anyone approaching whom they believe to be inappropriate and ultimately they can block them so why impose this arbitrary rule? It’s just this sort of big brother attitude that gets me angry (for obvious reasons). What has this to do with cars?

Well Apple have just applied for a patent that would allow them to lock out their smartphones if they detect that they are being used whilst driving. They will prevent you from sending text messages and using apps whilst behind the wheel. How big brother is that? Whilst I totally disapprove of drivers phoning, texting or playing games on their mobiles (do they actually do that) whilst driving it should just be made illegal not a patent pending!

My somewhat youthful ex girlfriend loved playing something called candy crush on my mobile. Does that mean that whilst the phone could detect movement it would prevent her using the game? I have friends who pass their phones over to their kids whilst driving to entertain them.

Apple Classic Logo Web 2.0 (Photo credit: Alistair Israel)

If they can no longer do that the kids would become ten times more distracting than a text message. Good grief can’t these people think through to the consequences of their actions? By Graham Hill

A couple of weeks ago I attended a conference, discussing the world and European car markets. One of the speakers said that he believed that the geeks would soon take over the car industry. We are already seeing Google developing a driverless car but unlike BMW and Audi, who are also developing driverless technology, the Google car will be packed full of amazing geek stuff.

Thinking of a change but unsure as to the best way to finance your car? Then you need a copy of my car finance book, Car Finance – A Simple Guide by Graham Hill. Click on the link below to buy the best car finance book on the market, available as a Kindle Book and Paper Back.

At the time I pretty much dismissed what was being said as pie in the sky and years away. Then I read about a new car stereo being launched by Alpine, the CDE-185BT. It looks like a normal stereo head (that’s the display to the uninitiated) but you then start reading what it can do. First off you can control everything with your smartphone.

It connects with facebook and keeps you up to date on the go. You don’t have to read anything it reads the updates out loud to you. You can even ‘like’ posts. Through its unique Tunelt feature you can custom tune from bass levels to speaker output and it can all be done via an app on your mobile phone, available as an Android or iPhone app.

You can stream music through Bluetooth, you can operate phone functions using hands free or talking through the head unit. There are loads of connection options through the front and rear of the unit. A USB connector is incorporated into the removable faceplate, ready to play music stored on a memory stick. There is also a 3.5mm mini jack aux input. The clever way that the unit is powered means it won’t switch off when the engine of a stop/start car switches itself off.

You can even buy extra cabling to connect up the unit to the car’s remote steering wheel controls. Finally it has variable RGB illumination. This means that you can have over 150,000 different lights behind the buttons and inside the two line LCD screen. And to think I thought it was just another stereo. Car manufacturers take note! By Graham Hill

For years my blog, www.thebestcarfinanceblog.co.uk has remained at number 1 on Google. Search Car Finance Blog and you will find my blog at number 1 out of 342 million (as of today, 5th August 2013). This is no mean achievement but it must say something about the quality and quantity of information that I post.

Even after being off line for several months whilst recovering from a hip operation I still remained at number 1. My next target is to take my book, Car Finance – A Simple Guide to number 1 in the best selling finance book list on Amazon. So if you would like to help and gain some insight into car finance please click the link below to get yourself a copy. You can buy the book as a downloadable Kindle or an old fashioned paperback book. Best wishes Graham Hill

English: Google Logo officially released on May 2010 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: 2011 Nissan Leaf electric car at the 2011 Washington Auto Show (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Google led the way in the US by gaining permission to test their driverless cars on public roads. We are now about to follow suit with the Government giving permission for driverless cars to be tested on public roads in the UK, preferably somewhere in the North as I live in the Sarf.

Thinking of a change but unsure as to the best way to finance your car? Then you need a copy of my car finance book, Car Finance – A Simple Guide by Graham Hill. Click on the link below to buy the best car finance book on the market, available as a Kindle Book and Paper Back.

Researchers at Oxford University have been co-developing autonomous car tech with Nissan for some time and have already tested a prototype based on a Leaf (that’s their electric car not something hanging off a tree) on private roads and test tracks.

The announcement means that they will be able to carry out more extensive tests on quiet rural and suburban roads although to begin with they will have to test with a back-up driver as a safety precaution. By Graham Hill Car Finance

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My blog continues to grow in stature, if you haven’t seen it you really should visit it sometime. It isn’t pretty but it contains more information than any other car finance blog in the world. As of this morning the site was number 1 on Google out of 200 million for the three word keyword expression Car Finance Blog . It has seen off it’s main rivals from Read more »

Image via CrunchBase

Many of you know of the so called money saving expert, Martin Lewis who has clearly saved many people lots of money on credit card overcharges and bank charges. I never deny that, but he has also been the source of miss-information. Take his personal criticism of  Carol Vorderman when she advertised consolidation loans on TV and Read more »

Image via CrunchBase

Is this a sign of the times ahead? The US state of Nevada has made driverless cars road legal. The development is down to the Internet search engine, Google. The firm has developed the technology behind the vehicles and lobbied for the change. The cars use state of the art technology such as GPS, radars and numerous cameras to detect traffic and Read more »

Image via Wikipedia

So you want to ‘pimp’ your aging Fiesta but not sure how to go about it? Well, Graham Hill’s Gadget of the Week sorts it out for you. The manufacturer, Ring Automotive guarantees that you will stand out from the boring crowd when you add their Prism Lamps to your car. They use white LED’s in a tube to surround your front lamps and red LED’s in a Read more »