Chris Harris

I didn't really. It was just a part of my life. It was just an amazing tool that did a job that I appreciated. And I adored it as much as probably more than many other cars. But it wasn't an object for me. I didn't objectify it by looking at it in that way. So where I absolutely have a problem is if a vehicle lets me down in a certain way or in a certain circumstance, it's kind of gone.

Ja jos se ei saa täyttää, se on hieman ongelma minulle, vaikka se on vanha. Minä voin olla melko raskas ja se on menossa. Ja se on vähän kuin...

I feel like a very, very brutal friend. You know the one in the playground that controls all the friendships, that bastard. You come to school one day and they wouldn't talk to you. You'd be like, what have I done wrong? They were just not a very nice piece of work who got off on controlling your emotions. I feel like that person sometimes because I go to the shed and there'll be a car in the corner and it's looking at me going, take me out for a drive, daddy. And I'm like, nah, you've balls this up. You didn't work last time.

You're out. You're out the door. And I do feel sometimes a terrible pang of guilt that I've done that. But the cull for me is not completing a journey. I think to turn around and look and not feel something isn't enough for me to sell a car. But I totally get how important that can be. And also, if you're looking at your absolute doyen vehicles, if you're talking about things that you love,

If you do turn around and you see it differently, well, that's the same as a schism in a marriage, isn't it really? If at one point you...

You look at someone in a different way. It's hard to come back from that. And I think that's happened as well. I've definitely had moments where I've gone, I'm not looking at you the same way anymore. Is it because the new ones come out? Is it because that ride height's always niggled me and I sort of put it to one side? Is it because of the way the last journey went or didn't go that I no longer like you as much? It is possible.

Amazing, you can draw this back to the concept of just turning around and looking at your vehicle. But I do. And I suppose, I also read this completely differently. And it was only when you started answering it that I pivoted there. I thought it was don't look back, as in, if you've got stuff from your past, don't look back, you know, flog it and move on. In other words, have a clear out. So you're all the masters of writing things that can be interpreted in several different ways. But that one, yeah.

You could write an entire book called Good Back, couldn't you? You could, 100%. Voice control. Why is it still shit? That is a complicated apostrophe there, but it works. Oh my God, I don't even know where to begin with this. I can tell you now, I've never owned a vehicle where I've used it. So let's go first to Chris Cooper.

I don't really use it anymore because it's frustrating. I'm going to ask Neil to answer this while I just quickly check while my dog's walking around out there. One second, all right? Yeah.

Very possible. Manish, have you ever used voice-activated controls in a car?

No, I think the litre of weed is going to basically go into the tank, so that the actual bowl itself will be wet. Okay, as much as I love reducing this podcast to the juvenile, I'm not going to go there, because that's ridiculous. I don't get these things at all.

but I like to be positive. I'm doing my nail clipper, putting a positive hat on. I'm not going to whinge. I'm going to tell you two ways in which this technology has worked for me. The first is vicariously, because I was recently filming on Tenerife,

joka, jos ette tiedä sitä, on maailman suurempi paikka. Olin sinne, paljon ihmisiä menivät loppumaan sinne. En oikein ymmärtänyt sitä. Se oli kaunis paikka, ilma tuli, mutta se oli niin suurempi, ettei pysty ylös. Joten jos et ole suurempi, en tiedä, miksi menisit sinne. Joka tapauksessa, olin saapunut kaunis womanin Mercedes V-klasissa, ja hän käyttäi äänenkontrollia koko ajan.

It was great to watch someone who actually, it's always good to watch someone operating a product in a way it was intended. So she had completely embraced this. The computer obviously liked her voice. And everything she did was, she just did it by voice. And the car responded. And it looked seamless and brilliant. Do I think for a minute it would have liked my voice or I would have had the patience to use it? Not for a second. But it was great to watch someone use it correctly.

The other situation which really did make me very grateful for it was I was in a BMW of some sort. One of the new ones that just has the massive screen that goes right the way across the dashboard. And you have a sort of, you've got a home button and to the right of it is the squares. And the squares bring up all the apps for the car. There are...

hundred, maybe more. And it's just not safe to search these things or look for something when you are driving. It may be much safer to sit and text someone on your phone because it's so complicated. And I thought, I think I was looking for something quite specific like tyre pressure or monitoring or something. And I thought, I'll press the speaky mouth button and I'll ask for it. And it found it for me. So actually in the increasingly de-buttoned world of the car interior, one can find

buried functionality in a way that you wouldn't otherwise. So those are the useful things. And I also have to sort of revert to type and say that I think for the most part it's an absolute waste of money. And I don't get it. I've never got it at all. But it's been going for a long, long time. You get into cars that are 20 years old and they've got the speaky mouth button.

That's a post-lockdown thing, really. I remember having an S-class with ladies sitting in, and the driver, good old Mike the driver, was doing this with his hand, and everyone was going off, and he was like, what's going on here? It was confusing. But yeah, that's another subject. I do remember when carmakers try and demonstrate their new technologies and it goes wrong, there was obviously the live feed where Volvo put out a live feed to watch a car of its...

do a reverse park maneuver live autonomously. That was a long time ago. So we all sat and watched on sort of 240p on a screen in the office, and it just drove straight on, and I think it reversed straight into another car. It was just, it was like a Monty Python sketch. It was terrible. And the Mazda Demio launch stands to mind as well. That's a

It was in Berlin and they wanted to demonstrate a new navigation system it came with. So they inputted this into the Mazda Demio and he just drove off. And none of us made it back for the meal. Because we were all just completely lost and had to find a landline to go back. It was just hopeless. It's Germany, I love it. It was, again, Monty Python. Do you remember the 100 meters for people with no sense of direction when it goes off? It was like that. Demio spread around Berlin.