People can be tetchy about things like this. For example, it has been technically possible for decades to have pilot-less planes (in military terms, they’re called drones) but would you fly to the Gold Coast on a plane with no pilot? Probably not. 

There are so many unknowns. Such as this: will driverless cars be eventually compulsory or will we have to go on with the roads shared by driverless vehicles, numbskull human controllers and the few good drivers – such as you and me?

Many years ago, I was sitting in Hargreaves Mall with a friend and we noted all the peculiar, mad, bad and sad people wandering about, occasionally bumping into each other, or light poles, or sitting sadly amid a flock of sparrows, dropping pie crumbs on the tables.

“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” my friend mused.

“What does?”

“The rather alarming realisation that most of these people drove here.”

You wouldn’t have to think about that in a driverless car world, I suppose. But would that concern merely be replaced by fears of rampant technology and everything which comes with that.

If humans are so bad at driving vehicles, which seems to be the underlying thought in the push for driverless cars – it’s likely we would also get driverless buses, trains and trucks. And humans will become less and less relevant in an eerie twist on the Matrix sci-fi films. Or Terminator: Rise of the Machines.

I suspect we’ve got it all back-to-front. We shouldn’t be pushing for driverless cars. It should be car-less drivers. Some think we’re already in the hands-free car future.

There was a wonderful story from the US not long ago when a woman sued Winnebago, makers of those sometimes huge things Americans call Arr-Vees, Recreational Vehicles.

Mrs Merv Grazinski, of Oklahoma, had been heading along a freeway in her new 10-metre long motor home when she left the wheel and walked down to the back of the van for a snack. It, of course, crashed. In her action she said Winnebago had failed to point out that “Cruise Control” did not allow you to go and have a little nap while the van drove itself. She was awarded a $1.75 million payout and new Winnebago.

How often would we need to re-boot a driverless vehicle? Would it resent it? Would it – like some nav-sat systems do now – drive you into Lake Weeroona because its mapping software said that was the shortest path home?

Now people who want to make a lot of money at someone else’s expense, such as Google, are talking about a driverless Uber system. You wouldn’t need to own a car anymore. You’d just send a message on your phone and a Jeeves 2.0 would pull up at your location and whisk you noiselessly to wherever you wanted to go.

This is scaring the car manufacturing industry rigid. To such a degree that Ford has invested heavily in a competitor to Uber in the US and, if this driverless world comes to be, Ford would then become a service providing journeys, rather than a maker of personal vehicles. The potential implications are numberless. Do we then go for driverless GPs, like full sized Scalextric slot car sets?