Rolls-Royce has an answer that can only come from a luxury marque when asked if it will develop a driverless car.
"I think we invented it," said the company's Asia Pacific regional director Paul Harris. "With a chauffeur."
Harris says although Rolls-Royce owners increasingly preferred to drive themselves, the days of Jeeves seated behind the wheel are not over yet.
"They like the ability to phone their driver up and say 'come and bring me the car now' or whatever. I see that all the time in Asia.
"So the self-drive car, I'm not sure it's really going to give you that option. For me, it seems to be an extension of almost buses really – they're driving around in certain circles and you ask them to stop at point A, you jump on board and get on with people you don't know and continue your journey."
In some ways, not much has changed over the years for the 109-year old luxury car brand, which was resurrected as a wholly owned subsidiary of BMW in 1998.
But Harris stresses the company, which still builds its cars – about 4000 of them a year – by hand in Britain, wasn't living in the past.
Going electric?
He says tighter regulation on auto emissions may fast-track the development of an electric vehicle, as pressure mounts on car makers to rein in pollution and offer emissions-free driving.
"Very clearly the board of directors have been saying, and quite rightly, that we're looking at a number of options," says Harris, in Melbourne this week to launch Rolls-Royce's new model, the Dawn convertible. "The trigger that will make us change will be the development of legal infrastructure in certain markets where we [then] may be omitted. So you may have a city in the US saying if you want to drive in the city you have to be electric only. And of course if that happens, we have to be able to react.
"But at the moment I think that's in the medium-term window. It's not in the short-term, so it's quite a way off."
Electric vehicles have muscled into the luxury car segment. US company Tesla has declared war on the internal combustion engine and unlocked its patents to speed up the development of mass-produced battery-powered cars.
And in October, Aston Martin revealed an electric version of its four-door Rapide, which normally has a 6.0 litre, V12 petrol engine.
But Harris says if Rolls-Royce produces an electric car, it will not be playing catch-up.
In 2011, it made a one-off, fully electric-powered car, dubbed the 102EX. Harris says most people expected the car to enter production, given the high quality of the prototype.
"That car was made as a one-off to live-test opinion of both consumer prospect and media. We almost got polarisation of opinions. We got people who were interested in Rolls-Royce who loved it and existing Roll-Royce petrol heads, V12 fanatics – and it's not they disliked it, they just love V12."
Changing attitudes
This led senior management to doubt the viability of electric technology, but Harris says views within the company are changing.
"Without mentioning brands, I think there is a heightened awareness to electric. The technology seems to be evolving in the right way.
"But I still think there is some anxiety amongst consumers when they buy products because they buy them with a longevity window in mind. They don't actually keep them that long, but there's that mindset. It's like when you buy a mobile phone, come two or three years' time and the battery is gone.
"The other issue for me is the accessibility of recharge ports. But that is slowly developing, maybe not at the pace it needs to and the consideration to recharge properly isn't there. However, once that infrastructure is there, and that will come quite rapidly in the next five to 10 years, we will be very clearly there."
The Rolls-Royce executive predicts that the next 15 years will probably involve more changes in the auto industry than in the last century. And that won't just include technological advancements, but also in the way people own cars (or don't).
"I'm in the generation where you owned cars or you leased cars. We're starting to see not even the commitment for three years, but the commitment for a day or an hour or two hours or by the minute or kilometres.
"It's all evolving and changing all the time. The importance for us is that we are there and adaptable."
