Perhaps the most important ride in my car life, in a self-driving VW through Hamburg

Quite a thing, the first test car that I don't drive myself. But the demonstration drive through a morning Hamburg full of traffic lights, people crossing the road and cyclists weaving goes smoothly. The gentleman who is behind the wheel for safety reasons to be able to intervene in emergencies doesn't have to lift a finger, great, great. You couldn't have executed the sometimes abrupt braking and steering interventions of the car better yourself. The city is the city, one game of panic football.

Who would have thought, an autonomously driving VW? Wasn't Europe far behind in the development of self-driving cars? VW took flight with the Israeli Mobileye, developer of self-driving technology. An existing electric VW bus was converted by VW's tech subsidiary MOIA – a glorified car-sharing company – with thirteen cameras, nine lidar and five radar sensors into an autonomous taxi. It is then called ID Buzz AD, for Autonomous Driving. For the uninitiated: Lidar is a type of laser radar that scans the environment extremely accurately, an indispensable component of the self-driving car.

Beautiful. But the cliffhanger of the experience is how you blindly trust experimental high-tech that will drag you through a world city without human intervention. I get it. The citizen trapped in his online spider web yearns for adventure, for the unthinkable. That is, I guess, the secret urge behind the innovation fever, that hunt for the grail. The hope for a miracle, even if it drags you deeper into the Matrix, even if it kills you. You can bet that soon everyone will want to go to Mars with Musk. Treadmill off, into the darkness – but free for a while. The flirtation with groundbreaking technology is utopian and suicidal, a dossier for thinkers. Unfortunately, they are just as adrift as we are. No one has control. That is what this is really about. That we can let technology find all the ways, except the way we have lost.

What a time. Ten years ago, Tesla and other ambitious manufacturers started announcing self-driving cars. Only they never came. Musk promised the moon until no one believed him anymore. There's even a Wiki page dedicated to his broken promises, laugh.

It is no small matter. The self-driving car is an intellectual top sport. It must know all the roads, be able to recognize and avoid every obstacle super-fast, see the difference between a cardboard box and a concrete block, have every roadwork and highway demonstration in its retina. Its observation instruments must function as flawlessly in fog and snow as on windless summer days.

The autonomous evolution path extends from Level 0 to Level 5. Zero stands for zero assistance systems, five for completely independent driving in a car without a steering wheel or pedals. In practice, no car manufacturer has yet gone beyond Level 2, despite overconfident promises, a little bit of self-steering and braking for vehicles in front. The driver must grab the steering wheel every ten seconds to prove that he is still there. Manufacturers can do much more, but governments have thwarted them with laws and practical objections.

Now the light is turning green in more and more countries. In May I saw how autonomous driving has taken off in the US. In San Francisco and Los Angeles, hundreds of perfectly functioning autonomous taxis from tech company Waymo, converted electric Jaguars, are driving around. Incidents do occur, but in the long term, autonomous driving is the safer option. That is why manufacturers are so pious and charitable about it. The market potential for car-sharing-like autonomous transport is enormous.

That's why this mini-drive was perhaps one of the most important in my car life. In the long term, your private car will also become the designated driver - and would you still want it if you could just as easily and for less money send an autonomous taxi to you by app? The social consequences could be enormous, for better or for worse. More boredom, more numbing screen time on the smartphone. Dramatic loss of income for the government due to the loss of fine income, because Mobileye doesn't do pedaling, of course, safety first. Then the biggest, chronically underestimated risk: a loss of human skills that makes the helpless human more dependent on a few tech giants. The new human needs to be able to do less and less. He becomes a playing field and finishing place for the technology he created himself. His last skills: coaching, tiktoking and tweeting. From that future, I stare out of the window of the Buzz AD with concern at the peaceful office and café present of buzzing Hamburg. And think: Lord, why have you forsaken us?