David McManus looks at Uber taxis and vehicles that can drive themselves

As the theme tune fades in and the end credits roll on 2015, it is apparent that one topic has maintained top billing in the world of tech in the past 12 months.

Transport, in its many varied methods and the way it interacts with new inventions, has featured prominently.

The brand word ‘Uber’ is rapidly becoming part of the language as the company continues to spread across the country after taking the US by storm.

Controversially, the taxi-like service uses smartphone technology to find a location, make payments and comment on drivers.

It is yet to operate in our fair city but it is only a matter of time before you hear people in Oxford say: “I’ll get an Uber”.

Uber’s controversy comes from the fact that, unlike traditional cabbies, its employees have no registered form of licensing and because their version of the Uber app makes full use of GPS for navigation, its drivers don’t need to have spent months learning a city’s layout.

Still, if the future of driving is as the current trend in motoring predicts, the need for anyone behind the wheel will soon be a thing of the past.

Driverless cars seem to have been in the testing phase for an eternity. It turns out that the hesitance in seeing them widely adopted on our streets is as much about public acceptance as anything to do with technology.

It’s easy to see why. The concept is alien to us. Think of a vehicle bereft of a driver and the only scenario that plays out is something rolling backwards down a hill. Everything in our brains screams danger at the idea.

Google is out to change our minds. Keen to maintain its no claims bonus, it says that in six years of testing driverless cars the handful of minor incidents have all been caused by the other vehicle – the one with a puny, fallible human in control.

Eliminate the possibility of error and you create far safer driving, it proclaims.

The Department of Motor Vehicles in California, where Google has been pushing for regulations to allow driverless cars, would still rather err on the side of caution. It has stated that, for now, all such automated transport would require a fully licensed driver behind the wheel.

It seems that this rule panders directly to public queasiness. If such a person must remain alert and ready to take over at any given moment, they might as well go that final step and be in control of the vehicle.

Seeing how some people argue with the cold, hard computational directions put out by their GPS devices, I can see more accidents caused by nervous drivers wrestling the wheel when their car ‘isn’t going the right way’ or has ‘plenty of time to overtake’.

Finally, 2015 was the year Marty McFly travelled to in the 1985 film Back to the Future where he zipped around on a hoverboard.

The fact that anti-gravitational devices remain science fiction has not stopped toys coming out sporting the name ‘hoverboard’ despite being incapable of hovering.

Indeed, in a serious twist, trading standards warn of fire risks from certain models and advise not to give any as presents.

Stay safe.