Next year Volvo will introduce systems that can read verges and barriers to prevent cars from leaving the road, automatically avoid low-speed accidents at night, follow road markings and minimise the speed of collisions with large animals (see videos).

Yet at the same time cars are increasingly becoming extensions of the home or office, thanks to new connected technologies and there are concerns that, as cars become more capable of driving themselves, drivers could divert their attention from the road to the connectivity options open to them.

How to minimise driver distraction is a subject that is occupying the thoughts of car-makers and the suppliers who provide infotainment systems, according to a report by news agency Headlineauto.

Candido Peterlini, the infotainment manager within the product planning section of the Fiat Group – which has connectivity systems in Chryslers, Jeeps, Ferraris and Maseratis – believes that one way is to monitor driver behaviour.

‘Today we can do it for economy driving. In future we can maybe monitor it for safety,’ he said. Cars could be fitted with a box that calculates the driver's “risk index” and the safest could be rewarded with lower insurance premiums.

Harman, a global leader in automotive connectivity and infotainment systems, is working on ideas that will allow drivers to perform more tasks without taking their gaze from the road or letting go of the steering wheel.

Already its systems include advanced voice control that can convert text to speech and vice-versa. By the end of the decade it expects nearly four million cars in Europe to have this feature. It is also working on gesture recognition, allowing drivers to perform simple tasks with a move of a hand or finger, and has developed a next-generation head-up display that beams safety information as well as navigation instructions and road signs onto the windscreen in the driver's eye-line.

‘Some of the things which today are below the driver's eye view need to be brought up,’ agreed Peterlini. ‘We need to make cars more attractive and more pleasant places to be in and easier to use, and the key to that is the HMI (human-machine interface). The question is how to make driving safer, and the technology to enable that is coming.’