WHEN Prince sang about his little red corvette in 1982, cars were the last thing on his mind. Clearly a lament for his painfully raw old chap, there’s an audible smirk colouring the wee man’s falsetto boasts of “smooth rides” and having “enough gas". It’s clearly smut – yet, a massive hit single that infiltrated the mainstream by way of a common euphemistic lyrical trope: the automobile.

Yet, without the enduring cultural malignancy of mechanophilia, Prince – or even rock n’ roll itself – might never have existed. Certainly, driving is a wonderfully empowering and pleasurable physical act, a showy mastery of complex mechanics beyond our ken. The inherent dangers of being in control of a one-tonne killing machine also prove we only feel truly alive when dicing with death.

Prince, of course, was also well aware of driving’s symbiotic relationship with sex. Gear sticks, headlamps, fuel nozzles, smooth curves and big boots – all clear evidence that cars were invented by a fellow deviant, one who would likely have been burned out of his house and banned from Twitter had he unveiled the blueprint today.

We should all be thankful for that pervert’s engineering prowess though. Without cars to inspire rock n’ roll, it’s likely we’d have been left at the mercy of macabre cabaret acts like The Krankies for entertainment - salacious filthmongers who have been around so long it’s rumoured they’re the original Adam and Eve. The Krankies will have super-continent Pangea Ultima all to themselves in two billion years time, likely performing the same disturbing act to baffled audiences of diamond-winged dolphin trees.

It has to be said, however, that in many ways Jimmy Krankie is the Scottish Prince – a petite, uncommonly feminine lad who became a mainstream superstar serenading youngsters with unspeakable smut. Yet, we have thankfully been spared the depths of depraved innuendo to which the Krankies’ act would have sunk if Wee Jimmy was old enough to drive. Perhaps it’s best he’s eternally condemned to the shell of a child like poor Claudia in Interview With The Vampire.

No sex, please, we're autonomous car engineers

SO, with the evidence for cars revving up our libidos quite clear, it does beg the question – what soulless eunuch would aim to neuter us by replacing the only aspect of our lives we remain in control of in favour of automatic aberrations? Presumably one who likes a wee drink and doesn't fancy paying over the odds for a taxi home from the boozer.

Ultimately, it’s the CEOs of major car firms to blame for this fully-automated dystopian vision, and there are two main villains – professional venture capital whisperer and amateur paedophile hunter Elon Musk and Google’s John Krafcik.

This week, the latter admitted that the grand futurist dream of a 40mph limit road network filled with depressed conga lines of silently assimilating pods will never happen. Bruce Springsteen will still have a career in the future.

According to Krafcik, not even a quantum computer programmed by God could deal with some of the everyday conditions human drivers often navigate with lobotomised ease such as snow and reflections. Cities? No problem. Self-driving trucks ferrying cargo on motorways? It’s already happening. But Ardrossan Asda car park in the snow as Grandpa McGinty reverses out at 75mph with his monthly haul of Paxo fish breadcrumbs blocking the back window? Does not compute and never will, apparently.

This week, Krafcik admitted that the self-driving car that can operate in any condition, on any road, without ever needing a human to take control, is an impossible dream. Not even with that alien tech from Roswell. “Autonomy will always have constraints,” he told Wall Street analysts, many of whom simultaneously broke their chins on the floor. “It’s really hard. You don’t know what you don’t know until you’re actually in there and trying to do things.”

Suspiciously, the cryptic wording of his confession actually could also apply to reverse engineering crashed UFOs.

Buzz of the new

Futurist car engineers certainly don’t seem to be fans of rock n’roll, sex or, indeed, cars. Rather, they favour impressionistic Fritz Lang movies and hazy notions of gleaming utopias with no dog s*** on the plastic grass or crystallised snot caked on the underside of the Apple Store's painfully hipster rustic desks. A gleaming, glitch-free perfect world is the aim. And the methodology is simple – applying automative processes to everything, overriding all, apparently undesirable, manual interaction with machines.

This surely can only have one inevitable outcome – our species devolving into mushy-brained, good-for-nothing idle-handed sandbags. More time for Twitter, of course, but you’ll soon be able to outsource your social media interaction to a hard drive containing a perfect representation of your neuronic framework.

The real question is – what is the point of being alive in a future where we’ve rendered ourselves redundant? Perhaps the answer arrived this week.

As male CEOs of major self-driving car firms were admitting failure in trying to render machines joyless and sexless, a group of female scientists actually achieved the opposite with a revolutionary new sex toy.

The Lora DiCarlo group had been due to attend the prestigious International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas after creating a “new micro-robotic technology that mimics all the sensations of a human mouth, tongue and fingers for an experience that feels just like a real partner”. It won’t tell you to stop putting empty milk cartons back in the fridge either.

The device’s creators are now alleging gender bias, however – after CES revoked an innovation prize they were planning to award the company. And, as if that weren’t enough of a slap in the chops, they were also banned from showcasing the Osé personal massager at the event. Lora Haddock, founder and CEO, said her team had initially been overjoyed when told they were to receive the CES 2019 Innovation Award. Not as overjoyed as the firm’s quality-testers, but still delighted to have won.

But, inexplicably, the device was then deemed to violate CES rules, which apparently frown upon “immoral, obscene, indecent, profane” inventions. So why did OhMiBod, which allows partners to pleasure each other from afar using wifi – win an award in 2016? And let's not mention the deeply disturbing men’s sex doll at last year’s CES. Or the VR porn company who allow folk to watch their movies at CES in full public view. Lora fumed: “You cannot pretend to be unbiased if you allow a sex robot for men but not a vagina-focused robotic massager.” Indeed.

It’s certainly ironic it’s taken the pursuit of pleasure to invent a device that guarantees you reach your destination without any helping hand – unlike self-driving cars.

And finally ...

MUCH of the testing of Google’s automated cars apparently takes place in some distant, dusty, devil's armpit called Chandler, Arizona – with the natives reportedly spooked at the sight of empty automobiles zooming around their roads. Perhaps believing them controlled by Satan or Democrats.

Retaliating to such voodoo on their doorsteps, many attacks on test cars have been reported in recent months. Assaults have included throwing rocks, running them off the road, slashing their tyres and, yes, shooting the spooky driverless b*****ds.

“There are other places they can test,” one resident, Erik O’Polka, said. “They said they need real-world examples, but I don’t want to be their real-world mistake,” he concluded, perhaps having exhausted his vocabulary.

Google, however, will not be pursuing legal action against the good ‘ol boys attacking their prototypes.

A spokesman lied: “We’ve found Arizonans to be welcoming and excited by the potential of this technology to make our roads safer.” As excited as the original natives of the Americas were upon Columbus’ arrival.

Join Bill on Twitter: @futureshockbb