Last Friday in Monza, I was invited to a talk on the upper floor of the McLaren motorhome. Never one to miss a free breakfast, I jumped at the chance to join a small group of journalists for a talk about the connected car, autonomous vehicles, and motorsport's role in what some view as the dark future of the self-driving automobile.

It was an interesting discussion in which the people from Freescale Semiconductors managed to make a number of complex concepts in engineering and communications technology understandable to the layman by explaining everything in the context of our mobile phones.

The short version is that F1 telemetry harvesting and data management is being used to inspire connected vehicles that at some point in the future - the year 2020 was mentioned... - will lead to fully autonomous vehicles able to prevent accidents and ensure no one ever breaks the speed limit ever again.

The good news is that autonomous vehicles should bring about an end to traffic jams, as they'll all divert themselves onto empty roads at the slightest sniff of congestion. Journey times will be improved, everyone will be safer as cars mandate safe gaps between vehicles, no one will ever be lost, and you will be automatically driven to a parking space without any need to seek one out.

Because the vehicles - we can't really call them cars anymore - will not be restricted by traditional safety parameters, what with being uncrashable and all (can anyone say 'the Titanic is unsinkable' with me?) designers can go mad, and we'll be treated to all manner of abstract personal transportation pods. 

And the bad news? Well, it just doesn't sound like driving will be fun anymore. No breaking the speed limit, no finding that perfect line on that swooping country road you know about, no more of anything unless you're paying to have a go in a historic car on a private bit of track.

Just pootling around in an automated bubble designed to lull you into a braindead sense of security. Because when we're not watching TV we're thinking too much, and who can support that?

And that's just looking at the whole thing from a (paranoid, petrolhead) first world point of view.

I'm hardly going to run around advocating that people die on the roads, but here in the first world we've actually got a pretty good handle on road safety. There's always room for improvement, and zero is the ideal number of road deaths, but the real tragedies continue to happen in the developing world.

Countries in sub-Sarahan Africa have shocking rates of deaths on the road. Many motorcyclists in the region wear dried gourds in lieu of crash helmets, as it's the only manner of head protection they can afford. Driving standards in India and China see horrific road death statistics in both countries.

While it's all good and well introducing the concept of a connected vehicle with a view to improving road safety, it will take a very long time before these connected vehicles hit the second- and third-hand markets and wind up in the hands of those who need them most.

If the designers of the connected vehicle are sincere in their avowed desire to improve safety standards around the world, they must find a simple and inexpensive way of integrating this technology into existing vehicles so that the developing world can begin benefiting from the added level of road safety at the same time as the developed world does.