Audi wants you to drive their cars to escape Amazon's scary drone delivery service

It's official – unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), also known as drones, have become a huge global talking point.

Following the release of the UK government's proposals on drone regulations on 6 March, 2015, the FAA rule proposal in February, and Southpark's hilarious episode about Cartman spying on his neighbours with a helicopter drone, now Audi wants to play on the rising public paranoia too.

The car company has released a TV commercial for its Audi A6, which is apparently the answer to a dystopian future where helicopter droves monitor our every move, when they're not falling out of the sky onto our heads.

Think Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 suspense thriller The Birds, only with helicopter drones carrying cardboard packages instead of creepy crows – probably a poke at Amazon's scuppered yet much-hyped Prime Air drone delivery service.

Alright Audi, very funny, but do we really need more paranoia about drones?

There are now multitudes of negative media stories about UAVs, from drones being flown where they're not wanted (White House crash landing), to fears by the military that UAVs will be used as weapons, to reports of helicopter drones being used by peeping toms to spy on neighbours.

Of course, there's positive news too – numerous videos are popping up to show how useful UAVs can be, from recording amazing aerial footage of places dangerous to humans like Chernobyl or the summit of a volcano, to being used to locate missing people or deliver medication to people in remote locations.

As the Audi commercial's tagline says: "Advanced technology doesn't have to be intimidating." Exactly.

Baroness O'Cathain, the chair of the House of Lords EU Committee that looked into drone regulation for the UK government, thinks that the public needs to relax a little.

She told IBTimes UK: "We're relying on people's common sense with this. To me, they're rather like kites in a way. Everything you buy has the potential for danger of some sort, but the legislations need to be proportionate. We need to treat human beings as sentient, as people who know what they are doing."