Over the past few years, we’ve seen computerized systems meddle with many things. Reasonable expectations of privacy, your ability to do your job without wading through whichever program management’s foisted on you this quarter, even the concept of reality judging by how many people seem to fall for AI-generated images. Now they appear to be coming for the art of driving fast. The first officially invigilated autonomous Nürburgring Nordschleife lap record has been set, and it’s a bit underwhelming. The weapon of choice for this record-setting run was the Xiaomi YU7 GT with the optional track package, an electron-fed 1,003-horsepower super-SUV from a brand that briefly held the Nürburgring EV record. We’re talking epic figures here: zero-to-60 mph in under three seconds, a top speed of 186 MPH, and a human-piloted Nordschleife time of 7:22.755. With hardware like that, we should be in for a reasonably quick autonomous lap, right? The good news is that it did manage to go ’round without crashing despite nobody sitting in the driver’s seat. The bad news is that its record-setting time came out to 10 minutes and 29.483 seconds. Given the Nordschleife’s 12.944-mile length, a lap time of 10:29.483 works out to an average speed of 74.09 MPH. That’s 119.23 km/h in metric. Granted, the autonomous YU7 GT did manage to beat some stuff. It’s quicker than a Ligier or a Trabant or a Mercedes-Benz G55 AMG. However, it’s not slower than perhaps the most culturally-known Nürburgring lap in a slow-ish car. Remember on “Top Gear” when Jeremy Clarkson ran a 9:59 lap in a diesel Jaguar S-Type? That wasn’t actually a full-length lap, but instead a “bridge-to-gantry” lap from the first bridge after the join to the last gantry before the exit on open days. If we’re ballparking based on the onboard