THESE are good figures coming from the #SMMTConnected event in London I attended today:

• £51bn boost for the economy
• A net gain in jobs – some 300,000
• A 1% positive impact on GDP

All good headline grabbing stuff from the SMMT event – read more in our news story Driverless car technology boost for UK jobs.

The event featured a report from KMPG called Connected and Autonomous Vehicles – the UK Economic Opportunity, from which the figures quoted came.

I asked John Leech, UK head of automotive at KPMG, what autonomous (or driverless) cars really meant for businesses.

“It means better productivity,” he told me bluntly. “Drivers can make better use of their time within the car while journey times will be shorter.”

In other words, you or one of your drivers could spend the two hours on the motorway usefully working on a laptop or making calls – and because autonomous cars would drive more efficiently, you would arrive at your destination more swiftly. All really good benefits.

But if you think that means some sort of dystopian future where you’ll never have fun in a car again because a computer is driving it for you, think again.

It seems the beauty of autonomous cars is that you can switch them into driverless mode for the mundane driving trips, but switch them back out when you want to have fun.

And if the efficiency gains of autonomous cars mean you have more time for a bit of fang-danging fun, then I’m all for it.

More on autonomous vehicles

Click to read Government’s green light to driverless cars