In a development that has sent shivers of pure, undiluted joy through the hearts of every middle manager who ever longed for a spreadsheet holiday, the autonomous RV has arrived. Finally, the open road has been tamed, flattened, and scheduled into 15-minute increments. The future of leisure is here, and it is terrifyingly convenient.

Let us begin by celebrating the death of the last remaining bastion of human chaos: the family road trip. No longer will children be forced to stare out the window and invent games involving number plates. No longer will dads pull over at a scenic viewpoint only to be greeted by a swarm of midges and a deflating sense of mortality. From now on, the RV will do everything. It will drive, park, and even suggest the optimal time to defecate based on the distance to the next rest stop.

I can picture it now: a sleek vehicle, all white curves and panoramic glass, gliding silently through the Cotswolds. Inside, a family of four stares at individual screens, their positions calibrated by an algorithm that has deemed this configuration ‘peak happiness’. The onboard AI has already queued up a documentary about the very landscape they are passing, narrated by a voice that sounds like David Attenborough after a particularly soothing cup of chamomile tea.

The manufacturers call it ‘frictionless travel’. I call it the final surrender of the soul to the great god Efficiency. What is leisure if not a series of glorious inefficiencies? The wrong turn that leads to a crumbling abbey. The argument over which radio station to play that ends with everyone singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ off-key. The spontaneous decision to camp in a farmer’s field because the sunset was too good to leave.

These machines will not allow such human follies. They are programmed to avoid potholes, crowds, and any establishment that does not have a 4.5-star rating on a platform. They will navigate you away from the charming but slightly shabby B&B and towards the sterilised, corporate-approved glamping pod. They will filter out the very texture of life.

Consider the economics. The average autonomous RV costs more than a small flat in a British city. But that is the price of freedom, they say. Freedom from thinking, freedom from maps, freedom from the delightful panic of being lost in the Dordogne at midnight. For a mere £80,000, you can buy a vehicle that treats you like a precious cargo, strapped in and pacified, while it does all the heavy lifting of adventure.

The insidious genius of this invention is that it will be marketed as the ultimate liberation. No more driver fatigue. No more navigation stress. No more arguments. Just pure, unadulterated family time. But what will that family time consist of? Staring at a windscreen that might as well be a television, watching the world scroll by like a screensaver. The RV becomes a moving prison, a luxury cell on wheels.

I foresee a new breed of traveller: the Autonomad. They will be people who boast about the number of miles logged without ever touching a steering wheel. They will swap tips on the best charging stations like old-timers swapping tales of narrow mountain passes. They will speak of their vehicles with a reverence normally reserved for deities. And all the while, the colours of the world will blur past, sanitised and filtered, as they sit in the lap of robotic luxury.

The natural conclusion of this trend is the elimination of the journey itself. Why bother going anywhere when the RV provides a perfectly simulated environment? It could just circle a motorway for a fortnight while you enjoy virtual hikes and digital campfires. The ultimate leisure becomes a simulation of leisure, a perfect copy that no longer requires the original.

I suppose there is a metaphor here about the human condition. We have built machines to escape our own messy, unpredictable, and gloriously stupid nature. But in doing so, we have also built a cage. So raise a glass of lukewarm duty-free gin to the autonomous RV. It will take you anywhere you want to go, as long as you have already decided exactly where that is.