Jags of the future will read your mind

Thought autonomous driving was the big noise of car technology in the next decade? Well, you’re right. But there’s a heck of a lot more stuff in the pipeline, some of which supplements that scary self-driving stuff and actually makes some sense out of it.

TG has delved, somewhat sheepishly, into Jaguar Land Rover’s lair of future technology to try some of it out. Mercifully, nothing expensive got broken in the process. Click through the slides to discover THE FUTURE. Possibly.

Yes. Cars of the future won't just spookily drive themselves, but they'll know what you're thinking. Kind of.

JLR is in the middle of a project called ‘Mind Sense', studying if a car can read its driver's brainwaves and react if they're of the sleepy, distracted sort.

Your brain produces several types of wave, see: alpha, beta, gamma, delta and theta. The latter two are associated with sleep and daydreaming, so if the car piced these up in excessive quantities - potentially though sensors reading your hands on the steering wheel - a warning could sound to wake you up. A car with autonomous technology could take over, and pull you over to a safe stop for necessary rest.

TG had a go, and (after the tech took a worrying amount of time to acknowledge we did indeed have a brain) it was all rather impressive, if a little spooky to see lots of morphing coloured lines beamed directly from our own head.

Jag says we could see it in ten years. If that's enough time for it to identify our infantile tendencies and lock the traction control on remains to be seen...

Branching off from scary mind reading is something more plausible, though still around a decade off.

‘Wellness Monitoring' sensors in the driver's seat constantly monitor heart and breathing rates, and use these to calculate how stressed or drowsy the person in control of the car is.

Interior lighting and climate control could be automatically adjusted to calm the driver down, while more severe circumstances would call for either a warning bong or some autonomous intervention.

In the most severe of situations, the car could identify the signs of a heart attack, pull itself to a safe stop and call the emergency services. Any less spooked out yet?

A bit of light-hearted relief from the brain invasion arrives in the form of something we can all get on board with. If you don't want a Range Rover Sport you can drive remotely from your smart phone, then we reckon the Wellness Monitoring seat would detect no pulse and immediately phone for an ambulance.

It all went very James Bond as first we clambered up into the passenger seat of the RRS, a suspiciously grinning engineer then slinging the car and us across some rather dramatic ramps, with just his fingers and a touchscreen doing the steering, accelerating and braking.

Our reward for surviving the ordeal was a go at driving the RRS by phone ourselves (yep, from outside the car), and contrary to all expectations beforehand, all went entirely to plan, the £100,000 4x4 remaining unscathed.

The 4mph top speed currently imposed by the system probably helped curtail any childish tendencies.

If it all sounds like a wonderful, silly boys toy, well, it essentially is. But there's sense to this one: when off-roading there could be hideous ruts simply invisible from the cabin. Simply clamber out, remotely negotiate them and then clamber back in to continue your journey.

And if you're protesting that a marginal number of these cars ever go off piste, then how does a less stressful way of squeezing through width restrictors or into tight parking spaces sound?

This one's entirely plausible, and could be here in five years, being essentially a step on from existing self-parking systems.

It's a piece of tech designed to take the pain and potential prang-ability out of a tight turns, using the parking sensors to turn the car 180 degrees between kerbs. This is typically a three-point turn, of course, but especially tight village lanes could call for something a little more Austin Powers.

U-turns will be covered too, as will dead straight reversing when you need to back away from a dead end.

It's described as a ‘feet off, hands off' system, so the car flicks between Drive and Reverse and does its own acceleration and braking as well as the carefully choreographed steering work.

This is where the only real stumbling block lies: as with the rest of autonomous driving tech, legislation and insurance liability haven't yet caught up with what's possible.

"It's not one for the enthusiasts," its engineer told us, "but it's a great way to aid mobility for older users, where restricted movement lessens their field of vision."

And if you've ever encountered a Range Rover driver not comfortable with the sheer size of their SUV, this is surely a godsend in waiting.

The virtual reality headset is nothing new, of course; they've been uncouthly plonked on people's heads for a while now, as a go-to vision of ‘the future'.

But far from being a clunky, motion-sickness inducing plaything of computer game enthusiasts, they've got a real purpose in life now.

JLR has been using VR headsets to speed up car development - a good explanation, perhaps, of why it feels like there's a new Jag or Land Rover every other week at the moment.

As well as mapping out interior designs virtually, to see what works before commissioning physical models, they are being used to learn any foibles in the production process before the lines are built and the car's design finalised.

The mapping out of the Range Rover's sizeable engine bay is an example: VR headsets ensured vital processes weren't out of reach for the shorter members of the production line.

And if you don't think you have any, you're wrong. Future JLRs will latch onto your favourite radio stations, and clock on if you listen to a different ones on your morning and evening commutes.

It'll prep the phone if you frequently call particular people at certain times of day. And it'll prompt you if you get in the car without your mobile.

Seat settings, climate control, the likelihood of the roof being folded on cabrios - the car's clearly-quite-nosey artificial intelligence will apparently remember it all, even identifying different drivers in shared cars.

Is it, y'know, necessary? Well, JLR argues that minimising how much time you spending poking screens and prodding buttons increases safety and cuts stress.

Fast-forward ten years to when self-driving cars commonplace, and there'll be all sorts of extra goodies too - if the car detects an important email it can alert you and offer to take control of driving while you deal with it, before handing control back when you get to a favourite piece of wiggly road.

You're back to being spooked out, aren't you?

Those driven mad by beeps and bongs from their cars should take solace - JLR is looking at alternative ways to prod your attention when something's up.

One idea is a tap on the shoulder via the seat, with a vibrating pulse if there's a cyclist or car in your blind spot, for instance.

We sampled something far less natural feeling, though: the haptic feedback accelerator. We trialled three different functions - a big old vibration to warn about that cyclist, a softer double pulse, a bit like the one when you get a text message, which would simply herald the arrival of some non-urgent information, and a single pulse that would kick in when you nudged over the speed limit.

For people who engage with and enjoy the process of driving - and we'd like to think you, dear reader, are one of those - it all seems a bit over-engineered and really quite distracting. For those who bomb about in an autopiloted daze, though, this could be tech that actually saves lives, particularly those of cyclists.

Posh adaptive suspension systems can be much more than a fancy bit of spec. Land Rover's semi-active Magneride system could help finish the war on potholes good and proper.

In the first instance, it can collate data it collects when a car has hammered through a particularly broken bit of tarmac, sharing the severity of the pothole and its location with other cars so their suspension can prepare before hitting it.

Beyond that, radars could scan the road ahead so that compiling the pothole database doesn't require initial wheel-crunching escapades.

As well as lessening the chance of component damage, preparing the car's suspension for impending ruts also benefits the ride quality.

Great news given how pothole-ridden British roads tend to be, we wager.

"They're even worse in growing markets like India and China," the engineer in charge of the project notes. If cars like the Evoque want the upper hand over their cheaper clones, tech like this ought to be the way to do it.

Much of this stuff is at least five years off, and some may never come to fruition. But JLR is growing at a rate that’s called for the building of a whole new dual carriageway to feed workers from the M40 motorway to the car park of its Gaydon facility.

The tech we’ve just had a poke around is surely only the tip of a huge, baffling iceberg.