I suspect that one day we shall discover that Tesla boss Elon Musk is actually a benevolent (hopefully) android sent from the future to try to help us along the path to a better motoring future.
How else do you explain how his tiny start-up car maker has become such a smash hit, albeit as yet an unprofitable one? How Tesla, still an utter minnow in car making terms, is being spoken of by the big car companies as a rival and one to be watched, matched and hopefully beaten? It really is quite remarkable.
And now, Musk has just given us another thin slice of the future, earlier than it was meant to arrive - the self-driving car. While the likes of Mercedes and Nissan say that the robotic car is still a few years away, Tesla has recently sent out a free software update that allows its ground-breaking Model S saloon to drive itself. Well, a little bit anyway.
Basically, all of the hardware was there already. The car already had parking sensors, a lane-keeping assistant camera and active cruise control, so the software (Model S Version 7.0 if you're asking) really just ties all of that, plus the electric drivetrain and power steering, together. The car will keep you running straight and true in a motorway lane, will change lanes for you when you ask it to by flicking the indicator (and only when it's safe to do so), will warn you if there are cars getting to close to you and take evasive action, of course, can park itself when you reach your destination.
Other car makers have this tech, of course. It's just that Tesla has been more ballsy and has decided to let it out of the gate and let the public play with it, a good solid year ahead of its major rivals. "The system will learn over time and get better and that's exactly what it's doing. It will start to feel quite refined within a couple of months," says Musk.
There are limitations of course. For a start, under current legislation, you're not strictly speaking allowed to take your hands off the wheel, so you have to keep at least a light grip, even if the car is doing the actual work.
There are also still some serious legal pitfalls. Ireland is not a signatory to the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Traffic, so isn't covered by the recent re-wording of that convention to allow for the use of self-driving cars, so if you're one of Ireland's few Tesla owners, you could technically be breaking the law by letting the car do its own driving.
As well as that, and perhaps not surprisingly, Tesla has had to announce plans to limit the Autopilot function in response to videos posted by owners which show the system not working on tighter, twistier roads, or drifting almost into oncoming traffic in others. Tesla made the point that as it stands today, the Model S is not actually a self-driving car, it's more of an augmented regular car, so the driver has to stay in command at all times, merely letting the systems take the strain but not outright control.
Musk says that in 15 to 20 years' time, all cars will have the option of autonomous control, and that Tesla will stay well ahead of that curve too. Presumably he still has a few tricks left in that personal time machine of his...