Here's how future Jaguars and Land Rovers will read your mind

Deep within Jaguar Land Rover HQ is a tech lair full of scary-looking machines, all of them being used to develop the British carmaker’s dream vision where your car intelligently soothes all your worries and removes the stress from driving.

One of the least complex is 'habit learning', a computer algorithm that learns your radio station, climate-control preferences and phone-calling manners in relation to the time of day, and pre-empts them. Less button prodding, more concentration for actual driving.

Once autonomous cars land, they’ll learn if you like twisty roads – which we hope you do – and offer control back when an interesting stretch approaches.

The bolder, next-generation extension of this is mind reading. Yep, really. But the science isn’t completely befuddling, and you shouldn’t be worried. Honest.

Your brain produces several types of wave: alpha, beta, gamma, delta and theta. The latter two are associated with sleep and daydreaming, so if the car picks these up in excessive quantities – potentially through sensors reading your hands on the steering wheel – a warning could sound to wake you up. A car with autonomous technology could take over, and pull you over to a safe stop for necessary rest.

TopGear.com had a go, and after the tech took a worrying amount of time to acknowledge our brain (it was there, honest), it was all rather impressive, if a little spooky to see lots of morphing coloured lines beamed directly from our own head. Jag says we could see this tech in 10 years. If that’s enough time for it to identify our infantile tendencies and lock the traction control on remains to be seen…

Also around a decade off is ‘Wellness Monitoring’. Sensors in the driver’s seat constantly monitor heart and breathing rates, and use these to calculate how stressed or drowsy the person in control of the car is. Interior lighting and climate control could be automatically adjusted to calm the driver down, while more severe circumstances –like falling asleep – would call for either a warning bong or some autonomous intervention.

And in the most severe of situations, the car could identify the signs of a heart attack, bring itself to a safe stop and call the emergency services. Told you not to be scared.