First off, who felt that it was necessary to take a 1965 Ford Mustang and give it the ability to drive itself? In what meeting did the green-light for that project happen? You can hear the shrieking hordes now…”Leave our classics alone!” This is like giving the Project X 1957 Chevrolet side-curtain airbags…you just don’t do it. But Siemens did do just that, and they decided to let the world see the results of their endeavor at Goodwood. With a carload of people, including a human behind the wheel…you know, “just in case”…the Mustang was sent on it’s way and what followed next resembled a Looney Tunes take on a drunken driver, with the Mustang lazily swaying this way and that up the road, occasionally making it’s way towards the hay bales or into the grass far enough to warrant a correction from the human via the steering wheel.

Even though the Mustang did to a better job at driving up the course later on and does have the distinction of being the first autonomous car to take on Goodwood, we are still sitting here asking the same question: why bother? The idea was to demonstrate the marriage between what a car used to be and what a car could be in the future. Sorry, but even before we saw this thing move on it’s own accord, we were against the whole idea. You want to make some five-door ovoid-shaped crossover drive itself so people who can’t be bothered don’t have to be, fine. Leave machines whose entire reasons for existence involved the driving sensation alone.