Driving your own car could one day be just a hobby, like riding a horse, rather than an everyday means of transport, according to a driverless technology expert.
Paul Copping, from Digital Greenwich, is one of the people who are working to make autonomous vehicles - ones that can think and make decisions - a reality.
He said the aim is to remove human drivers from the equation, explaining: "Letting somebody loose in a car to drive themselves will eventually be considered to be not worth the risk."
Mr Copping and his fellow professionals have good reason to think like this, because 94% of road accidents can be blamed on human error.
And the head of Google’s driverless cars project, Chris Urmson, refers to motorists as the "bug" in driving that needs to be fixed.
Around the world, work is being done to make driverless cars a reality.
"The biggest challenge is on the testing side," explained Dr Mike Bartley, a driverless technology expert.
"There are so many random events that can go on ... how can you design the software to handle [them]?"
Dr Bartley's team is testing in simulators, as is Google, whose cars cover the equivalent of three million miles every day.
The company's vehicles are also out in the real world, where they may have found the ultimate "random event" that a driver could have to deal with on the road.
"Our vehicles ... encountered a woman in an electric wheelchair, chasing a duck in circles on the road," said Mr Urmson in a TED Talk.
"It turns out there is nowhere in the DMV [the American Department of Motor Vehicles] handbook that tells you how to deal with that," he joked.
"But our vehicles were able to encounter that, slow down and drive safely."
Public acceptance is another problem facing driverless tech specialists.
A recent survey found 39% of people in the UK would consider using a self-driving vehicle, but that number rises to 62% among young professionals living in cities.
"Driverless cars seem to be the next step to make people's lives that much easier," said technology reporter Rhiannon Williams from The Daily Telegraph.
"Driving will maintain its place in the hearts of a lot of people, but in terms of the more boring side such as dropping the children off at school or going to the supermarket, automated driving will take over because nobody loves doing that."
It's hard to argue with that logic.
The pilot projects continue, with problems still to solve including security, accident liability and insurance.
But experts say you could be using a fully autonomous car as soon as 2035.
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