ROBO BIKE

In an ancient episode of Top Gear (we’re talking pre-Clarkson, and by a long way) there was a jokey interlude in which an old sidecar outfit rode off on its own, without a rider or passenger in sight. The BBC would have had a boffin hidden inside the chair doing the riding, but 50 years later, there really is such a thing as an autonomous motorcycle. It can stop, go, change gear and corner all on its own, but looks like a standard R1200GS.

BMW was cagey about why it was inviting a group of journalists to its Miramas test track just outside Marseilles. We thought it was something big, because they made great play of the fact that this had never happened before and that we must not, under any circumstances, take our own pictures, presumably because there would be top secret stuff