AUTONOMOUS cars are just around the corner. Cities across the world are rolling out pilots of driverless vehicles, and soon motorists in Germany will be able to relax on the autobahn as their cars drive them from Munich to Berlin (see "London is set for driverless car roll-out – so what comes next?"). In other words, we are on the brink of a transport revolution as potentially radical as the one that began in 1908 with the Model T Ford. By 1931 the automobile's transformative power was so clear that Aldous Huxley imagined the people of his Brave New World worshipping Henry Ford as the creator of their dystopian society. Huxley was on to something. The Ford revolution changed Western society.