Silicon Valley, California - Speeding down Route 101 at a cool 110km/h heading into San Francisco, I'm with a driver whose arms are folded. It's utterly surreal.
Suddenly the car swings into the inside lane. There's nothing between it a solid concrete wall, and we're heading towards a big curve in the road.
I must look terrified because the driver - who is still calmly refusing to touch the steering wheel - reassures me we are not about to smash head on into the barrier.
"The car is reading the solid white line, which separates the highway from the wall," he says. It makes me wonder what would happen if leaves, an oil spill or some other obstacle were to obliterate the line which protects us from a certain collision and probable death.
But then everything about the Tesla - a driverless car that Silicon Valley is developing to take on the traditional motor manufacturers from Detroit - is different.
Its 0-100km/h acceleration, which puts it in the Lamborghini and Maserati class, is both exhilarating and frightening. As we speed down a straight track, parallel to the motorway, the G-forces hit you. Your stomach is left behind as if riding a roller coaster.
Best of all is the parking. As we return to the Tesla centre the driver abandons the car on the lot and we clamber out.
As we walk away, he presses a parking button. The vehicle straightens up and backs accurately into a space between two other similar vehicles. What, I ask, happens if I (or worse) a child were to find themselves trapped between the driverless reversing car and the space? It would stop dead, he assures me. But I didn't ask to try it out.
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Although it looks like a traditional car, and is intended to compete with upmarket European models such as Mercedes and BMW, the Tesla is built of aluminium, powered by 7000 lithium batteries under the chassis and controlled by intelligent technology which makes the driver all but redundant.
Its developer, South African-born Elon Musk, is one of California's self-made innovators. He is also working for America's space agency Nasa in developing reusable rockets to power satellites into space.
Despite the relatively high price - $70 000 to $140 000 (R1 million - R2 million) - 110 000 Teslas have been sold. Pre-orders, with deposits, for the new smaller Model 3 have reached 300 000.
One of the reasons why the Tesla is doing particularly well in California is that it has been embraced by the upmarket shopping establishment.If the internal combustion engine is finally going to meet its nemesis, it was always likely to be in the San Francisco Bay area
Retail centres such as Westfield San Francisco Centre have agreed to install fast recharging stations in the car parks.
If the internal combustion engine is finally going to meet its nemesis, it was always likely to be in the San Francisco Bay area. The young men and women in flip-flops and T-shirts filling its streets at weekends are software engineers and code writers not long out of college earning up to $250 000 (R3.6 million) a year.
Daily Mail