Henrik Matzke is in the driving seat of a car, poised to make a very unusual manoeuvre. The car pulls up to a junction. He concentrates for a moment, willing the car to turn. The steering wheel spins, and the car veers to the right, accelerating away.

With his hands on his lap, Matzke is driving the car with thought alone, often at speeds up to 50km/h (31mph).

He’s part of a team at the Free University of Berlin working on what they call the Brain Driver – a project that’s hoping to bring research into reading and interpreting brain signals into people’s cars and homes. What is it like to control a one-and-a-half-tonne vehicle with your mind?

The original premise behind Brain Driver was to build a system that someone with a physical disability can use to manoeuvre through the world – as well as cars, the team has developed the technology for wheelchairs too. Brain Driver would, in theory, allow them to drive by simply thinking “right” and “left” and “forward".

But turning that dream into a reality is as hard as it sounds. Adalberto Llarena, a roboticist with the Brain Driver project, says the team has faced two main challenges: the hardware and the humans. On the hardware side, they’re trying to design a commercially viable piece of equipment that can listen in on the brain’s whispers and turn them into meaningful signals that power a machine. On the human side, they’ve got to develop something that real people can actually learn to use.