The main gallery of the Science Museum contains George Stephenson’s Rocket and a Model T Ford, machines that revolutionised transportation in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Yesterday morning, beside that pair, were two lozenge-shaped vehicles designed to effect a similar transformation in the 21st century.
The doors of one of these capsules folded back like a pair of butterfly wings to reveal a grey-and-white interior, seating for four and no sign of a driver or anything that one might drive it with: only a button set in the wall, with the word “start” written beside it. Mark Simmons, 6, from South London, followed his grandmother inside. “It looks like an alien spaceship,” he said.
It was built by a designer of the space age. Martin Lowson worked on the Saturn V Rocket, which launched the Apollo missions. He later designed the rotor blades for the world’s fastest helicopter.
The bubble-shaped, driverless cars with black, bug-eyed windows are his solution to the problems of urban travel. He began working on the system in 1995 and next year they are due to start operating at Heathrow, carrying passengers from car parks to Terminal 5.
“This could have the same effect on transport this century as theRocket had on the 19th,” he said, the bright zeal of the revolutionary gleaming for a moment in his eyes.
They are battery-powered taxis without a taxi driver. They lack any opinion on immigration, and any antipathy towards minicabs.
Passengers programme where they would like to go via a touch screen, and they coast along at 25mph on their own narrow road system.
They represent a personal rapid transit system, an idea that has been around since the 1950s. The US Defence Department, which is seeking to make a third of its combat vehicles unmanned by 2015, sought to stimulate developments with an annual driverless car race in California.
The cars had to negotiate a mock urban environment, full of competing driverless vehicles and other cars driven by stuntmen.
Paul Buckett, a spokesman for Volkswagen’s autonomous vehicle unit, a past winner of the race, said: “We could deliver a car to your office [near Tower Bridge] that could drive to Bristol. The technology exists, the problem is liability if there is an accident.”
Instead, the first driverless car in public use will be Professor Lowson’s “ULTra Personal Pod Cars”. Bath and Daventry councils are considering joining Terminal 5 in this putative revolution, and his company has received inquiries from America, the Middle East and India.
Paul Firmin, of the Institute of Transport Studies at the University of Leeds, has concerns about the potential “dehumanising” effects of the pod car system, but believes that its arrival could prove a crucial moment in public transport. “I will be watching Heathrow airport with bated breath,” he said.
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