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Today Tesla Motors is leading the way.
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No, a $57,400 car will need a lot of energy to be assembled and a lot of people can't afford it.
The real change in cars won't be:
Burn Coal -> Power a lithium battery -> Drive the car that you own
That model doesn't work. There is not enough lithium on this planet and we don't have the tech to mine asteroids in a cost effective way.
It's quite ironic that those who worry about peak oil don't worry about peak lithium.
It's autonomous vehicles.
Autonomous vehicles will make driving with taxis cheaper than driving with a car that you own. It's the game changer.
It will alter the economics of car travel and the taxi companies will have an incentive to make the energy costs per mile as low as possible.
If you pay per drive and you want to drive alone you can drive with a one person taxi that's smaller than your 5-person car that you use at the moment to drive to work. That saves energy.
For car companies it's not really that much different for their business models whether they produce electric cars or whether they produce oil driven cars.
If we however only need a fifth of the amount of cars that we produce at the moment because nobody owns their own car anymore the car industry has a problem.
Today the people working in the research say that we could have autonomous cars in 10 years.
Guess what the car industry isn't really interested in putting serious money into developing self autonomous cars (they invest a bit but not much).
If you ask them they tell you it's because customers don't want autonomous cars.
You have more lobbying for lithium battery research then you have lobbying for autonomous car research.