McLaren 47 Rendering Flips Our Perception on AI and Autonomous Cars

Do the same thing during a long-distance dull highway cruise, and I might show a lot more interest. After all, anything is more interesting than holding the wheel straight while the same dull landscape keeps passing by, minute after minute, hour after hour. That's wasted time you're never getting back. We bet we wouldn't even have audiobooks if it weren't for the highways, and perhaps the podcasting industry, too, would be doing a lot worse.

Despite the fact that flicking a button to make your car drive itself would prove very helpful in certain situations - and nothing would be forcing you to press that button when you didn't want to - most people seem to be slightly reluctant about autonomous driving technology.

That's partly understandable: we're essentially asked to give up control and entrust a machine with potentially our lives. That's not something people tend to be casual about, even though some clips featuring Tesla's Autopilot might contradict what we just said.

But there's more to it than that. We perceive it as a threat, as something that's going to fundamentally change the way we've been doing things for over a century, and people don't usually deal well with changes of this magnitude. Plus, it threatens to steal something we hold dear: driving.

Well, this project from Sushant Saini wants to put a different spin on what a powerful AI installed in our cars can do for us. To showcase his idea, he also created a beautiful, if a bit over the top McLaren prototype inspired by bats and the art of shrink wrap sculptures.

His focus on the British super sports car manufacturer isn't coincidental. He thinks - and we agree - that with the wider adoption of self-driving cars, the ones that will hurt the most are precisely the more driver-focused models. It's not hard to imagine a future where, in order to drive on public roads, you'd be forced to buckle up and engage your AI driver, in which case sitting in a low-slung McLaren as opposed to a spacious minivan makes no sense. To survive, these cars would have to offer something special.

That something special would be their ability to drive their owner to the track where the AI would essentially drop the chauffeur suit for the overall of a racing instructor. Imagine having access to various great drivers of the past who could teach you how to emulate their driving style, all during perfectly safe interactive sessions.

It's a great idea and one that should be relatively easy to implement given the crazy-high computing power these vehicles would need to possess anyway. Sushant even included a tear-jerking comic in his project where the car's AI teaches its owner how to race and even helps him win titles. Years later, when the man is too old to race at the same level, the car can still help him relive his past glory by retracing his title-winning races with perfect precision. That sounds like something a great friend would do (who needs dogs anymore, right?)

As far as the McLaren 47's design is concerned, it looks as cool as you would expect a 2040-something single-seater to. Its aerodynamic features are a little out there, particularly at the back, making it look more like a stingray than a bat. Not that resembling a stingray was ever a bad thing - for cars, that is, not humans.

Whether there's room for any of that in the future of self-driving cars, it remains to be seen. Still, you can't deny how exciting it is to think you might one day get one-on-one racing lessons from Ayrton Senna or Michael Schumacher (or Colin McRae, if rallying is more your thing) - all without having to pass through any pearly gates first.