Your next car might be one that you don’t need to sit in the driver’s seat to operate. They are called autonomous Cars. More and more cars and car companies are transitioning to automated car services. After years of trials on city streets, driverless vehicles are now nearing the live phase. Last month, a driver less bus began carrying passengers through Lyon, France. Most in the automobile industry think self-driving vehicles will be on the road by 2020 or before, says Richard Holman, who is head of trends at General Motors.

Driverless cars will initially coexist with human-driven cars. But the first places where they will become dominant are dense urban areas precisely the spots most damaged by the automobile age. This is “a chance to have a do-over for cities,” Chase told this month’s Autonomy conference in Paris. Many advanced cities are already reducing the role of cars. Driverless cars will hasten that process. Nissan, Tesla, and Mercedes-Benz all have a leading role in bringing autonomous cars to the front running of cars. Tesla has since developed autonomous a line of different models of autonomous cars. These cars are a combination of driver less cars and manual cars.

Cities don’t want everyone to own their own driver less car. That would prolong congestion, and isn’t necessary anyway. A driver less car is the perfect cheap taxi — it can drop you at work, and then go off to collect somebody else. If you still insist on driving your own car, cities will probably charge you for the privilege: motoring will become a luxury, like owning and flying your own plane. Driver less cars could allow cities to cut vehicle numbers by about 90 per cent while transporting the same number of people. They will bring us enormous benefits:

• Driverless cars will reduce accidents by around 90 per cent, predicts Pascal Demurger, director-general of French insurer MAIF. That’s big — the annual death toll on the world’s roads is about 1.2 million a year, or double the toll from armed conflict and homicides combined.

• Pollution and carbon emissions will drop, because urban driver less cars will be electric.

• The elderly, the disabled and teenagers will suddenly gain safe mobility.

• People will save fortunes by ditching their cars. The average cost of owning a car in Europe is about €6,000 a year. If you think personal cars will survive as a status symbols, remember that horses were once a “status symbols”.