The battle to take control of our roads by developing the first widely-accepted, fully autonomous self-driving car is intensifying amid rumours out of Cupertino that Apple (AAPL:NDQ) is secretly recruiting its own army of auto experts. The speculation surrounds possible plans to develop its own self-driving vehicle, already being dubbed the 'iCar'.

This led UK IT veteran and founder of the respected TechMarketViews website, Richard Holway, to speculate that the Silicon Valley-based technology titan should buy $26 billion electric vehicle innovator Tesla (TSLA:NDQ), a move that would barely dent Apple's $178 billion cash pile.

The world's biggest technology companies are all eyeing opportunities in the emerging connected cars space, including Samsung (005930:KS) and Sony (6758:T) in the Far East, while Google (GOOG:NDQ) has been testing its own driverless cars for years.

(Click on chart to enlarge)

Telematics, or black boxes that collect driver data in real-time, is seen by many as one of the stepping stones towards the Holy Grail of truly hands-off travel. As the chart shows, this is a rapidly growing development supported by governments, regulators, plus the vehicle manufacturing and insurance industries.

However, there are several technological challenges facing self-driving car enthusiasm. According to Chinese electronics giant Huawei, reliable broadband network coverage is among the key issues, along with network speed and latency, or the time it takes for a digital system to send a request and get the response back. 'Real-time data collection, transmission and processing of a huge amount of data remain challenges,' the tech giant says, although some of these implied problems may be solved by next generation technologies, such as 5G mobile networks, improving rapidly improving cloud computing and the emerging Internet of Things technologies (see Cover)