I'd love to live in a world where roads were full of auto-driving electric cars that automatically went to recharge and were replaced by fleet cars, and stopped at various points for people to load up. Like personal, on demand busses.
> stopped at various points for people to load up.
By that point, we will all have integrated computers in our body, probably with some kind of brain-machine interface so we don't need to interact with them. We can just telepathically request a vehicle to take us somewhere.
Screw that, I want Star Trek style beaming up by the Scottie5000 bot in space.
No reason they couldn't be electric. One of the big barriers for electric cars is a short running length and long recharge cycle. Neither is an issue if your 'car' is just an (autonomous) taxi service that runs off to recharge itself when you're done.
Obviously that doesn't mean it isn't using a fossil fuel somewhere along the power chain, but I imagine the efficiency isn't much worse than bus routes - and it's not like they need to target the exact same use case, either.
