Commuters in a rush to get home from work are now able to hail a remotely driven taxi in a UK city. 

At the peak of the rush hour people are seen daily at Milton Keynes rail station searching the queue of waiting cars for an available taxi. 

But any licensed driver can now use an app called Fetch which has been developed by local firm Imperium Drive and allows the customer to hail a remotely driven car to their location. 

The vehicle is being carefully steered by an operator back at the company base, with no-one at the wheel. Once it arrives, the customer can self-drive the car to their chosen destination. 

And then when the journey is finished, it is remotely summoned back to base, again driverless.

Imperium Drive CEO Koosha Kaveh said for an initial 18-month phase, the vehicles will be monitored by a safety driver, as a precaution, but will eventually be entirely driverless. 

"Our technology essentially allows for a passenger car to be remotely controlled from a control room by a human," he said. "And then slowly in the coming years we're planning to allow more and more autonomous driving functionalities to our system until we make it fully autonomous."

Initially, Fetch is only operating four cars in a small area, including Milton Keynes railway station, but there are ambitious plans to expand to other cities. 

Last month the UK’s first driverless bus service launched in Scotland, also with support staff on board, marking another step forward for driverless technology becoming more widely used in public.

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The Fetch scheme has taken around four years to develop and was carefully monitored in road trials for 18 months. 

Some road safety experts have questioned the concept of a remote operator, but the scheme is backed by the government and local authorities. 

Kaveh insists that safety is a priority for the company.

"We still have a lot of safety features that we’d like to build, before we’re comfortable to remove that safety driver," he said. "But in addition to that we also have also built a lot of safety features within the car."

While some surveys show a level of public apprehension about driverless cars, it seems the technology is well on track to become part of our everyday lives.

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