The self-drive car

I have a car which used to have a self-drive setting. It no longer does.

I used the self drive setting occasionally. It was handy because it would allow me to take my hands off the wheel, and let me focus on other things.

One day it all went a bit strange.

I had got confident enough in its intelligence to never crash, never go wrong. So I decided on this fateful day to let it drive my friends to the picnic place up the valley. I would take the van and drive behind with all the stuff.

It was all going fine, I was following from behind, until I saw I do a funny manoeuvre. It pulled out and overtook some cars parked at the traffic lights.

It was a slightly dangerous move to make and I couldn't figure out why it had done it.

Then a few minutes later, I saw it drive on the other side of the road against oncoming traffic to overtake a van. It was starting to concern me.

I had a app on my phone from which to control my car, but the phone I had left in the other car, the one which was driving strange. Oh no, I could not even use my phone to let them know how to turn it off using the phone!

The car did not want to be back in normal drive mode. It was having too much fun in self drive.

I witnessed it go the wrong way round a roundabout, go off road through a field, and beep it's horn while waiting in a traffic Que.. Everyone must have thought the drivers to be so rude! Little did they know that it was a car with a little too much confidence.

Then the strangest things started happening. I watched it drive over to some trees, and then it drove up the trunks of the trees. It then drove over the branches and onto the leaves, and across the canopy of the trees. I watched it from afar with a face of amazed worry.

When I thought it couldn't get any more strange, it did. Suddenly the car took off into the air. And flew around the wood and over the field. By now a large group of people had gathered to watch the self driven car which thought a little too much.

What are you going to do to stop it? they asked me.

I don't know I replied. But I must try something.

I ran after it. I shouted at it, "come back car!"

I don't know quite how it happened but by now the car had transformed into a flying drone, the size of a small bird. It was circling about the field, like a fairy or bee.

I climbed up on a wall at the edge of the field and jumped up into the air just as it was flying past and Snap! I caught it between my hands.

I never thought I could catch it, but luck had it, I did! The crowd clapped. The friends who had shrunk became their normal sizes. And the phone which was in the car was found and the setting for self drive was turned Off!

It took the car a few days to return back to normal.