A COLLEAGUE of mine was once late for a meeting. When the editor asked where he was, we were told he had been summoned to court to pay a backlog of parking tickets. What we didn’t realise was that, for our hapless friend, these tickets were his rent. He wasn’t just overstaying the metre’s time limit. The company car was doubling as a bachelor pad. Having been booted out by his girlfriend, wherever he parked each evening became home, filled with the detritus of takeaways, dirty shirts masquerading as footballs and the scent of Eau Sauvage. Where once the Scotsman’s home was his castle, now it was a Vauxhall.

At the time his seemed an extreme case, though I suspect it’s not as rare as you might think. Judging by the contents of a couple of vans parked near my flat, their owners’ brick and mortar properties are no more than the place where they use sanitary facilities and collect the mail.

Now, however, the idea of the car as a mobile home seems to be written into every new vehicle’s spec. Manufacturers have twigged that few of us can bear to be parted from our creature comforts for even a few minutes. By comforts, of course, I mean digital gadgets and apps. Hence the design of cars now on the market by Fiat, Toyota and Honda where there are touchscreens allowing drivers to connect to Facebook, Twitter and whatever other platforms are essential to their wellbeing even while on the road. If ever there was an oxymoron, this concept is it because nothing is vital to a driver except complete concentration. Having recently missed a signpost and found myself rattling headlong on metal tracks towards an oncoming Edinburgh tram, I am all too aware of the need to keep your wits about you.

The idea of someone posting photos or retweeting Stephen Fry’s latest aphorism while bombing down a motorway is nothing short of terrifying. As a spokesman from the road safety charity Brake commented, “it is quite clear that transferring apps from smartphones to the dashboard is an enormous distraction and could lead to casualties and deaths”.

Would you feel safe with a Facebook fiend on your tail? Even at slower speeds the consequences of inattention can be deadly. Taking your eye off the road for two and half seconds while going at 30 mph results in travelling 30 yards without a clue as to what might have appeared in front of you. A pram could have toppled into the gutter, a cyclist be thrown from her bike or, as I saw from the bus window the other morning, a middle-aged woman might have collapsed on a busy junction and need passers-by to drag her to safety from the path of charging lorries.

The announcement of the latest in-car technology is badly timed, coming as it does in the wake of calls for harsher punishment for motorists found guilty of using their phones. Indeed the idea of "mobile homes" has taken on a new and sinister meaning. Recent cases of fatalities caused by drivers texting or making calls highlight the heartbreaking cost of completely unnecessary distractions. Thus it is staggering to think that the automobile industry is wilfully blind to the fact that by offering enticing high-tech facilities they are encouraging behaviour that will almost certainly increase the toll of injury or death on our roads.

I wonder if whoever thought of making social media available in the front seat sleeps easy at night? Don’t they have nightmares worrying that a techno-addict might one day fail to observe the traffic lights, and roll over a crocodile of school kids? People like me fret even about changing radio station or glancing down to check the speedometer or petrol gauge when in a built-up or busy area. At times, when cars, bikes, joggers, jaywalkers and buses seem to be making military manoeuvres on me from all sides, the in-car devices I’d really appreciate would be an extra pair of eyes and a co-pilot.

With traffic getting ever more congested, tempers thinner, and pedestrians and cyclists more brazen, how can it even be legal to put such technology within reach of the driver? I’m not denying that it is for every motorist to take responsibility for their actions. That goes without saying. But aware as we now are of the population’s compulsive use of smartphones and the like, installing such software is like dangling jelly babies in front of a toddler. Who could possibly resist temptation?

How ironic, then, that as the advent of driverless cars draws closer, Britons are rather anxious at the prospect. A survey has shown that, if a robot was taking decisions at the wheel, we would not feel relaxed enough to read a newspaper or catch up on emails. Instead, we say we would prefer to keep our eyes glued to the highway, foot hovering over an imaginary brake. I find this hard to credit. Can these timorous beasties be the same drivers who would feel perfectly safe whizzing along the ring road while scrolling through tweets or even sending them?

With companies such as Google, Apple, Ford, Toyota and Rolls Royce ramping up the race for the ultimate driverless vehicle, it is only a question of when, rather than if, invisible electronic hands will be at the wheel. Already driverless taxis are being piloted by Uber in Pittsburgh, while Google’s test fleet of automated cars are a familiar sight in California. Industry experts, however, predict that a hands-free future is likely to be preceded for quite some time by increasing “highway autonomy”. In other words, by cars that brake, steer, indicate, change lanes and park without our intervention, yet which still require us to be behind the wheel.

Is this human-robot hybrid, or half-way house, the result of mistrust at the idea of hurtling along in a metal box under the control of artificial intelligence? Any sane individual would have qualms about delegating their safety, or that of their family, to an electronic circuit and sensors. Yet, after decades watching the way some motorists behave, myself included, I am beginning to think that the sooner the entire process is fully automated, the better for all of us.

Which brings us back to state-of-the-art, in-car screens that threaten to put everyone’s lives at risk. Instead of focussing on features guaranteed to make drivers more dangerous, shouldn’t manufacturers be throwing all of their ingenuity into building safer cars? Whether they are completely driverless, or largely autonomous, that would without doubt be the most socially aware and ethically responsible thing the industry’s boffins could do.

Years ago, one wet winter night, I found a homeless man bleeding and unconscious in the middle of Great Junction Street in Leith. A bus was bearing down upon us and as I stood, waving my arms, I put my trust in the driver looking up from his ticket machine before he hit us. Thank God he was not on Facebook, otherwise the status of the poor fellow and me might have been updated for the last time shortly thereafter.