Hitch up your (driverless) wagon

“I’ll just overtake that lorry” might soon become a decision requiring a tea-break, if trials of driverless “HGV platoons” hit Cumbria’s motorways soon.

Believing there’s a motorway in the UK with quiet stretches is a little like me believing the sun doesn’t glint off the top of my head due to the luxuriant swathes of hair. The Department for Transport think otherwise though, suggesting that the M6 in Cumbria fits the bill nicely, according to a recent article in The Times.

To make sure we don’t start bragging about our empty motorways as well as our beautiful countryside and very full lakes, the DoT are, it seems, proposing that tests of platoons of up to 10 lorries might tootle through our county, with only the one at the front being driven by an actual human person type-thing.

The other 9 will play follow-the-leader using the sort of electronics previously reserved for getting people into space, or calculating how many people find Donald Trump disturbing (to the nearest billion - no software is that good).

To make this already alarming site even scarier, the trucks will be just metres apart. Of course, if you’ve ever been obeying the speed limit on any single-carriageway road with an Audi driver behind you, you’ll know what that looks like anyway.

Apparently, Chancellor George Osbourne will fund this, as it has the potential to speed up deliveries, use less fuel and cut congestion.

All very ‘Star Trek’ and clever, for sure. Not so great if you’re motoring along and decide to overtake that lorry in the slow lane, as the lure of a motorway service station coffee in a chipped mug has become too great to resist any longer.

Last time I checked, lorries are quite tall. So if you’re overtaking 10 of them, you could easily miss the signs telling you you’re just scintillating moments away from a cuppa that tastes like the beans were freshly burnt, just for you. Plus those little plastic pots of UHT milk that you can’t open. You wouldn’t want to miss that, now would you?

And what if one of these wagon-trains is rumbling past the slip road as you’re attempting to get on the motorway? Slowing right up just before pulling onto a bit of tarmac where people in white vans are attempting to break the sound barrier sounds pretty dangerous to me (I have got a Mitsubishi Colt though, so I do have to apply in advance to do that anyway).

We should get a better idea of what the plans are when the Chancellor delivers his Budget speech later this month.

I just hope they’re not using mobile phone signals to send the communications along the lorry chain.

You might get a signal around the Houses of Parliament strong enough to download all the Beatles albums in under a second, but round here you’ll be lucky to have got the first note of “Baby You Can Drive My Car” in the bag by lunchtime.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 11th of March 2016, where it was retitled as "M6 overtaking could be tricky".  

Strangely, the opening section in quotations was replaced with "The decision to overtake a lorry on the M6...", creating a sentence with the word 'decision' in it twice.  

Making up that rather odd grammatical decision was the inside-front-page index block. Sideways look at life?!

I quite like that. Shame they're still using the same 4+ year old photo of me though, when their online version (if they update it) has a photo taken last year, which was done at their request.

Trust me - seeing a picture of yourself in print every week never stops being slightly disconcerting. Especially when the picture has more hair.

(CD A-Z: Still listening to those MP3 jobbies of an Argentinian radio show about ELO. In 23 parts. An hour long each. They like ELO in Argentina, apparently.)