To many the idea of a driverless car is an innovation too far. Why would you rely on a computer, when surely it’s safer to remain in control of your own destiny on the road?

Spending a large chunk of my life tramping up and down the M4 to London and M6 to Manchester for work, I’m increasingly in love with the idea of letting the car take the strain, not me.

If the automotive industry and governments around the world have their way, it won’t be too many years until my wish is granted.

Companies like Audi, Ford and Volvo have been working on ‘automatic’ cars for more than a decade, vehicles that rely on an array of sensors akin to radar that continually monitors everything around your motor.

Your vehicle ‘knows’ the speed limits and can ‘see’ what’s happening before you would.

Governments are moved to test this bold new technology because it looks as though computer control would be safer for everyone, fellow drivers, cyclists and even pedestrians.

The big news is that self-driving cars already exist, and they have been performing tremendously well on real roads in all manner of dangerous situations. The internet giant Google has been running a fleet of driverless cars since 2008, driving over 400,000 miles across a number of American states, including the densely populated cities of San Francisco and Las Vegas.

The Google cars have a manual mode where a human driver can take control by moving the steering wheel. Critics of the system should take note, the only recorded crash took place when a human was driving.

Testing driverless cars is now taking place in Oxford and the Department of Transport has announced they will be on public roads before the end of this year.

It’s going to be some time before I’m enjoying a coffee or reading my iPad on the M4, but much of this new technology is slipping into our current vehicles. If your car has guided parking, or adaptive cruise control, this uses technology that will be present in the first widely available driverless cars, which should take to our roads in less than a decade.

As soon as you learn to trust technology, life becomes a little easier.