Drive Dynamics - Look no hands: Self-driving cars on a road near you?

Close your eyes and I'll take you there is what they sang in the musical, West Side Story. Fifty-eight years later, that proposition is the promise of the 21st Century automobile.

The self-driving car has long been the stuff of science fiction. Now it may soon be here, on the streets of Britain and other places.

The British government is interested, and putting money into the proposition. Three consortia of consultants companies and universities are revving up trials in places such as Greenwich, Bristol, Coventry and Milton Keynes.

But they have some catching up to do. For the past six years, Google cars have been cruising the roads and streets of California and Texas with a human driver ready to take over from the autonomous machine in an emergency.

They have racked up more than one million miles of autonomous experience, 14 accidents (mainly being rear-ended by distracted drivers), and vast amounts of data about this sort of transport.

To outsiders it appears as if Google has cracked the future of car, and even parked one of the first prototypes in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Silicon Valley, California. I sat in it (static) last summer.

A Google Lexus driverless car

Google's driverless cars have already driven over one million miles

Autonomous vehicles do indeed have huge potential. In theory taking human beings out of the driver's seat altogether could cut accidents to close to zero. People who cannot drive for some reason could use car transport.

They could vastly increase the density of road use, eliminate looking for parking spaces, and then do the tricky business of parking. They could hugely reduce the cost of road transport by replacing truck drivers with computer power.

They could turn our roads into great channels of schematised connectivity with vehicles moving close together in a similar way to how information moves along the Internet's fibre optic "pipes". IT specialists are always frustrated with the random chaos of roads and motorways, now - they think - road transport is ripe for true digitalisation.

That is the vision. Getting there is difficult, like all transitions. And many different groups of people are working on it.

Legal obstacles

One of the most eye-catching schemes in Britain is in Milton Keynes, where the Autodrive Project wants to deploy a collection of small autonomous electric pods.

Arrive at the railways station, step into a two-person pod, say where you want to go (in a limited town centre range of addresses) using your smart phone, and off you drive.

The pods are designed to use the ample pavements of Milton Keynes, not the roads where autonomous vehicles are not permitted by law. The trouble is, to use powered vehicles on pavements is going to need a change in the regulations, too.

A driverless vehicle known as a Lutz 'Pathfinder' Pod during a photocall in central London on 11 February, 2015

These driverless pods will go on trial on the pavements of Milton Keynes later this year

This is nothing like the drive-anywhere experience promised by the enthusiasts. It's a reminder of the Segway dilemma in Britain, imposing severe legal restrictions on a mode of personal transport heralded as revolutionary when it was introduced in 2001.

Illegal to ride a motor vehicle on the pavements, illegal on the roads too. No doubt the legal problems will be resolved for the pods.

The pods are part of the great familiarisation process that will be needed to make autonomous driving acceptable - not just to the users inside but to the people on the roads and pavements who encounter them. It's a question of trust.

What laws have to change to make this possible? What local regulations? What is the role of insurance companies in a transport world where (theoretically) the chance of accidents is reduced to almost zero by the intelligence of the computer driver?

And (big question) who has the best chance of creating a really autonomous vehicle? Existing car manufacturers or the tech upstarts trying to break into the market - people such as Google or Tesla with little or no prior investment in the internal combustion engine?

For more information visit - http://www.bbc.com/