THE information superhighway will increasingly replace the motorway as the business community makes more use of electronic media as an alternative form of travel, says a new report from Autoglass.

By the year 2010, drivers will have slashed weekly journeys by almost 40%, with commuters and business users leading the trend away from today's culture of car dependence. According to the study, which involved quizzing almost 900 motorists nationwide, the average motorist's weekly number of car journeys will fall from 19.2 to 12.1. Nationally, this equates to 237 million fewer drives a week - a reduction of 37% to 400 million drives.

The report says employees would welcome a shift towards teleworking from home, with almost a third saying they expected to be able to do so by 2010. Employers are equally receptive to teleworking, with BT projecting 3.3 million teleworkers - one in six of the workforce û by the end of the decade. Assuming 15% of the workforce worked from home there would be a daily reduction in petrol use of 2.7 million gallons and declining dependence on the company car.

Fleet managers offer a very different vision of the future- one in which company car becomes more important to the average employee.The communications revolution which makes teleworking possible also makes the company car - equipped with phone, fax and modem links - an office extension.