In 10 years it seems we’ll all be driving around in cars that owe more to the machine I’m writing this on than generations of automotive engineering.

The Tesla is a good example. Invented by a bunch of geeks in Silicon Valley, it’s effectively a flying laptop.

It contains a huge lithium ion battery, the sort that overheats when you watch too many YouTube videos. The design brief was apparently to wedge this into a carbon fibre body, chuck in a few bits from Lotus and off you go.

Admittedly, it goes like the clappers. This stripped down milk float can burn off a Porsche and even a Ferrari at the lights. But the prospect of “filling up” at PC World instead of the petrol station leaves me cold.

Nauseatingly, the latest Roadster is called a ‘2.5’, not because it has the equivalent of a two-and-a-half-litre engine but because it is ‘version 2.5’ — techno-babble for a Mk II. Apparently, it has not been improved, it has been ‘upgraded’.

Clearly it is designed to be driven by people with brown shirts fastened to the collar and dandruff over their shiny nylon blazers.

These robots speak in binary code rather than English and of course will consider themselves “*&%^”, translating as “cool”, for driving a sports car they bought after downloading the latest “app” on to their iPhone.

Sitting behind their iPad-inspired dashboards, you can just imagine them blowing an iCircuit as they take a corner too quickly.

So it’s somehow satisfying that like every other piece of clever technology, the Tesla has its flaws.

The company recently recalled 439 Roadsters after it was discovered a power cable was chafing which could potentially cause a fire.

With the driver effectively sitting on that huge battery, the news did not inspire confidence.

This after a similar recall last year when bolts in the steering system had to be adjusted amidst concerns drivers could lose control of their vehicles.

Not great marketing on a car that costs more than £80,000. Perhaps Tesla chief executive Elon Musk wants to test out the PayPal payment system he co-founded.

For that money you can get yourself a decent Porsche 911 and think more about driving a real car than something you can “plug and play”.