I’ve just returned from a trip up and down a significant length of Britain’s M6 motorway. Its over 300 miles (480 km) of driving with no more than a few hundred feet of space between you and the vehicle in front, often much less. This requires a good measure of patience and concentration, especially when the weather is bad and it often is!

During an hour of queuing near Manchester, I found myself wondering why I had to drive at all. A number of vehicle manufacturers have explored the idea of autopilots. Many have been aimed at controlling, or limiting, the speed of vehicles or preventing crashes when drivers fall asleep at the wheel by selectively applying the brakes. But I seem to remember that some were playing with the idea of enabling vehicles to collectively assume control on motorways to form a kind of highway train. Science fiction writers have presented a future where our vehicles possess the limited artificial intelligence to chauffeur us wherever we want to go for decades. However, this is not a trivial problem in traffic on standard roads. But on the motorway the traffic is hopefully going in a single direction and the junctions are much simpler than on normal roads. Many people don’t like the idea of being overruled, but this way the average speed is controlled to match the weight of traffic.

Personally I like the whole concept. Instead of sitting in a traffic jam in appalling weather concentrating hard on the brake lights in front and hoping the guy behind me is doing the same, I could be taking a nap, reading a good book, eating or just thinking about this blog. All of this strikes me as a much more interesting use of my time. I wonder whether it will ever really happen?