As the Strait of Hormuz remains shut, and pretty much every driver on the planet feels the effect in their bank account, electric cars have suddenly begun to look even more attractive. And that’s great. We love clean air. But it seems we’ve moved very quickly from the simple, environmentally friendly vehicle consisting of a couple of batteries, an electric motor and some wheels, to something bordering on the dystopian. New electric vehicles are now fully computerised and connected surveillance machines that create and collect data at a disturbing rate. We are told that it’s all for our own good – that it’s all about safety. Whether it is the £20,000 Citroën Ë-C3, that you will see in many urban areas, or the £200,000 Maserati GranTurismo Folgore, that you will see perhaps less often, EVs are almost all equipped with the latest sensors. They are also equipped with the latest DMS technology – that stands for “driver monitoring system”. Sensors are nothing new. In the 90s, your car would already beep at you to let you know that you were backing into a wall, that a door had been left open, or that someone didn’t have their seatbelt on. It wouldn’t tell you exactly which one of these three options it was, which somehow kept it fun. It just beeped until someone, usually the driver, started yelling, and then it would magically stop. What has changed recently is the sheer number of these sensors. You would be forgiven for mistaking some of the new electric vehicles’ specs for the description of an average submarine. Take the Chinese tech giant Xiaomi’s latest flagship EV, the SU7, for example. It has one LiDAR sensor (Light Detection and Ranging), 11 high-definition cameras, 3 millimetre-wave radars, and 12 ultrasonic radars. I’m pretty sure all