• WE have all heard that cars are getting smarter, GPS, global positioning system, computer-controlled engines, proximity cameras, collision warnings and, soon, driverless vehicles.

In fact some vehicles (SUVs, sport utility vehicles, for example) are so intelligent that they make their ”owners” pay huge prices to purchase them, license them, insure them, maintain them, park them and pay their running costs.

In exchange, once your SUV gets bored with sitting parked for around 96 per cent of its life, it deigns to let you ferry it off to meet its friends in traffic queues, by the school gates, and in supermarket car parks.

While you, the “owner”, gets to benefit from less than 5 per cent of these costs the SUV reflects that it spends over 95 per cent of your money just to move itself around.

Now that’s what I call intelligent!

JOHN HARTLEY, N1