Cars

When Eileen, a 75-year-old British grandmother, bought a brand-new car she found its advanced driver-assistance repeatedly told her the speed limit in a 30mph zone was 80mph and then kept jerking the steering wheel to ‘correct’ her, even when she was trying to park. She told Which? that driving had gone ‘from a lifeline to a nightmare’. ‘I’ve seriously considered getting some old, beat-up car from five years ago that doesn’t have this technology,’ she said. Car safety features are boring and intrusive, like having a man with a clipboard and lanyard permanently in your backseat. Indeed, the Which? survey of more than 1,500 motorists found we are increasingly switching off all that ‘safety’ tech because it’s actually dangerous, distracting or useless.

It’s unnerving to think how close Britain came to financial disaster last Friday, ahead of a Supreme Court ruling on – of all things – car financing. In October, the Court of Appeal found that motor finance firms could be liable for hidden commission payments to car dealers. If the Supreme Court had agreed, the biggest lenders, including Lloyds Banking Group, Santander, Barclays and Close Brothers, would have been on the hook for some £44 billion, with Lloyds already putting aside £1.15 billion for compensation payments and Close Brothers selling off its asset management arm this year.

The device you see on this page is called a ‘paceometer’ and was devised by behavioural scientists Eyal Peer and Eyal Gamliel. It features in their scientific paper ‘Pace yourself: Improving time-saving judgments when increasing activity speed’. Study it carefully, because as many people have confirmed to me, it will ‘change the way you drive forever’. Nassim Taleb described it as ‘mathematically trivial, but completely counterintuitive’. The inner digits show speed in the conventional way: in this case miles per hour. In other words, how far you travel at some velocity in a given time. The small digits around the outside are the paceometer: they show the same information but expressed the other way around.

The builder boyfriend sat nervously in front of my laptop as I logged him in to do his speed awareness course. I sat him at the kitchen table, I clicked the link the speed course people sent him and then, as we waited for them to admit him, I began my pep talk: ‘Do not say anything political. Do not joke. Joking is the worst thing you could possibly do.’ I had already decided this was going to end badly. How could the builder boyfriend button his lip long enough to get through a three-hour online speed awareness course – the result of a trip to the UK to do a roofing job – without being reported to the police for coming out with something you are not allowed to say any more?

The weekend’s Scunthorpe drama was a distraction from endless chatter about Donald Trump and his tariffs. Perhaps Downing Street’s spinners stage-managed it with that in mind. Or perhaps the heroic tale of shop stewards confronting villainous Chinese managers while rescue teams scoured the horizon for emergency shipments of iron ore and coking coal was a different kind of smokescreen – to hide the fact that British steelmaking has been doomed for decades and what just happened is a job-saving nationalisation that will be a massive drain on public funds for as long as it takes to admit that the last British blast furnaces belong to history. I’m sorry to take such a downbeat view.

Crash comparison What’s the biggest stock market crash ever?  – There are different ways to measure a crash. The biggest percentage fall in the Dow Jones Index in a single day occurred on 19 October 1987 (or ‘Black Monday’) when the Dow fell by 22.6%.  – The biggest fall in percentage terms over a longer period was in the Nasdaq – covering tech shares – which fell by 80% between January 2000 and October 2002. – The biggest fall in terms of the amount of money wiped off the US market – at least until this week – was in February/March 2020, when the S&P500 lost 34% of its value over the course of a month, including losing $3.3 trillion of value in two days.