Audi RS7 (bettorodrigues/Bigstock.com)

To those among you who really love driving – the wind in your hair, the thrill of acceleration, the growl of a decent engine – Google's cartoon-like (and completely driverless) bubble car may seem like somebody's trying to stop your fun.

It's like you've finally got into Technics Lego and have built your first racer with turning front wheels and proper suspension, then being told you have to go back to playing with Duplo bricks.

But if Driverless cars are ever to be exciting, then Audi (who incidentally did participate in a line of Technics Lego sets based on its RS5 DTM) could be the company who manages it.

A recent piece in TopGear online reveals Audi's antics in the field of autonomous cars – where it has been tinkering for 10 years already.

The TG piece talked about Audi sending a special autonomous RS7 around the Hockenheim circuit over the weekend – with the aim of completing a lap in under two minutes.

And in the actual piece, Stephen Doble went head-to-head with the machine-Audi Despite his fears over competing with a potentially perfect electronic brain, he managed to beat the robot car with a time of 1m58.3s compared to 2m01.6s.

To send a car around a circuit at such speed is the antithesis of what Google have been doing with its driverless technology, crawling around the sunny streets of Mountainview at 5mph.

But some among our breakdown cover client base will be glad that if cars do have a driverless future, at least we may still be able to experience the thrill of high speed car travel – and who knows, if it becomes super-safe, we might even be allowed to go much faster than human drivers are allowed to go.