Text 1: Nobody at the wheel, by Sana Mirza

An original contemporary newspaper feature.

The car that comes to collect me has a spinning sensor on its roof like a lighthouse lamp and nobody in the driving seat. I booked it on an app twenty minutes ago, as part of a trial that allows members of the public to ride in self-driving taxis across six square miles of the city. When I tap my phone against the door, it unlocks and greets me by name. I have never been so reluctant to get into a car.

For the first three minutes I sit very upright, hands in my lap, watching the steering wheel turn itself. It is a deeply strange sight, like a piano playing in an empty room. The car indicates, checks, pulls out and joins the traffic with the manners of a driving examiner. It stops for a pigeon. It waits at a roundabout so long that a van behind us sounds its horn, and I find myself apologising to the van.

Then something odd happens: I get bored. The car is so careful, so steady, that my fear has nothing to feed on. I check my emails. By the time we reach the station I have almost forgotten that the car is driving itself, which is, I suppose, the point.

Earlier, at the taxi rank outside the station, I had talked to Viktor, who has driven a cab in this city for nineteen years. He was not bored. ‘It doesn’t know the city,’ he said. ‘It knows the map. When the road floods by the bus garage, I know. When the match finishes, I know which streets to avoid. Does it know?’ He was laughing, but he also asked me, twice, how much the trial was costing.

The company says its cars have driven a million miles without causing a serious accident, and a team in a control room can take over if one gets confused. That is reassuring. It is also slightly chilling to think of someone, somewhere, watching my journey on a screen.

When I step out, the car thanks me and glides off to its next passenger. I do not tip it. That, more than anything, feels wrong.

Text 2: My first journey in a motor carriage, by Edmund Carver

An original magazine essay written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this magazine essay, written in 1897, a writer describes being taken for a drive in a friend’s new motor carriage.

My friend Mr Lucas has bought a motor carriage, and on Thursday, against the advice of my wife, my doctor and my own better judgement, I consented to be driven in it from his house to the village of Aldbury, a distance of six miles.

The machine stood in the stable yard like a dog-cart that had lost its horse and was ashamed of it. To set it going, Lucas’s man turned a handle at the front with great violence, upon which the whole carriage began to shudder and bang as if in a fever, and gave off a smell of petroleum which I can only compare to an ironmonger’s shop on fire.

We started with a jerk that threw my hat into the road. Once recovered, we proceeded at a pace which Lucas assured me was twelve miles an hour, and which felt like sixty. The hedges flew past. The wind filled my eyes with tears and my mouth with dust. Lucas, gripping the steering handle, wore an expression of such perfect happiness that I had not the heart to complain.

Our progress caused a sensation. Children ran beside us shrieking. A carter’s horse reared and backed his cart into a ditch, and the carter offered an opinion of motor carriages and their owners which I will not set down. At the foot of Aldbury Hill the engine gave three loud coughs and died entirely, and we were obliged to push the carriage up the hill ourselves, watched by a ploughman who leaned on his gate and enjoyed himself enormously.

Lucas tells me that in twenty years every street in England will be full of such machines. Perhaps he is right. For the present, I observed that the horse which pulled us home from the inn at Aldbury did so in perfect silence, without once filling the air with smoke, and I fancied he looked at the motor carriage with a certain contempt.

Both of these texts are about riding in a new kind of vehicle.

Compare:

• the writers’ experiences of travelling in these vehicles
• how the writers convey their feelings about the journeys

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