Steve Rogerson discovered excitement at last week’s Move conference in London as AI and automated driving start to go hand in hand.

There is nothing new about the idea of a talking car. I remember British Leyland producing the Maestro in the early 1980s that told you useful bits of information such as your seatbelt was undone or your lights were on.

Rather than championing a new era, if anything the Maestro set the industry back, so prone to error was its chatting dashboard. Added to this was the problem that few garages knew how to service it properly. The car would helpfully tell you when you switched on that it was due a service, but many garages did not know how to tell it that it had been serviced. The car would thus happily continue to inform you it needed a service for ever, or at least until you turned the whole system off, which is what most people did.

This was a long way from Kitt, the famous fictional talking car from the TV series Knight Rider that hit our screens about the same time. The Maestro didn’t stand a chance.

Having cars giving you the basics by voice is now commonplace though the desire was still there to have something more akin to Kitt, but even with the advances in driver assistance and autonomous driving that we have seen in the past decade, the intelligent sounding car was still a long way off, or so we thought.

Step up AI and large language models, and suddenly there was the answer to the car maker’s dreams. Having a conversation with your car suddenly became reachable. This was very noticeable during conference sessions at last week’s Move mobility show in London. Speaker after speaker talked about how AI was going to change the world inside the car.

This excitement has been growing steadily for the past few years but not before last week had I seen such an outpouring of hope. The reason I think has come from China, where the fast-growing EV industry is adopting quickly the smart technologies that we find in our phones. In the West, the focus has still been on safety and automated driving; in China, they have taken the plunge.

They realised much more quickly than their counterparts in Europe and the USA that having a car that will play games with you, recommend the latest tunes, show TikTok videos, and even have an intelligent, or not so intelligent, conversation was a lot more fun than one that kept you in lane while on a motorway.

Yes, of course the driver assistance features are important and China has adopted them, but the latest generation of young car buyers don’t just want but expect a similar experience with their cars as with their other gadgets. The car becomes yet another addition to their connected lifestyles.

That this was dawning on people in the industry hit me during a keynote panel at the Move conference when Dong-Su Kim, who runs South Korean firm LG Technology’s venture capital arm (www.lgtechventures.com) in Silicon Valley, mentioned that it was far more enjoyable to take a robotaxi in California than an Uber or regular cab because you didn’t have to worry about the driver.

I asked him about that later. He said: “You can set the air conditioning as you like, you can choose the music. It is a more pleasant experience.”

Elon Musk’s Tesla (www.tesla.com) also dipped its toe into the robotaxi world at the weekend with the launch of a limited service in Austin, Texas, though it turned out it was not as ready as expected as these will still have, for the time being, a safety driver in place, albeit in the passenger’s rather than driver’s seat. And they will have teleoperators who can take control remotely if needed.

So, a true Kitt is still a long way away, but advances in AI have moved us an important step closer. The industry is getting excited, as it should be, but let us hope they remember that to sell this to the new car generation, they have to make it fun. After all, if the robotaxi firms have their way, this might be the last generation for which owning a car is the norm.