"I live in an apartment, I can't charge one on the street."
The electric car revolution is going to come at the same time as the self-driving revolution. That will change the calculus of parking significantly. No longer does your car need to be parked right next to your building to be convenient: it can be anywhere a short drive away and summoned at the touch of a button. So charging infrastructure doesn't have to be at every on-street location; it can be centralized to parking lots or garages on a neighborhood basis.
That's either a very pessimistic view of electric car progress or a very optimistic view of self-driving capabilities.
I think electric car revolution will be at least two decades earlier than self-driving.
As far as electric goes we are starting to reap benefits of vast investment in better tech, manufacturing and vehicles purpose built for it.
Self-driving is very far away and the best publicly available systems only do slightly more than lane-assist, the by far simplest part of self-driving.
The earliest electric cars I noticed on the streets were glorified golf carts. They were ideal for very short distances, like getting to work & running errands.
Couldn't self driving cars in the very near future follow this same path? Find a very densely populated area. Get self driving cars to work very well in that area for short trips. Slowly expand to similar areas?
I haven't followed either of these very closely, so please correct me where I'm wrong.
That's kind of where self driving busses go. The first prototypes run short routes on aiports or something like that. But I don't think that short routes on normal streets are significantly easier than long routes on normal streets.
You're coupling a very complex solution (self driving) to a much simpler one (electric vehicles) in order to solve a niche problem (urban dwellers without garage parking) who could either be served with other potential solutions, like charging at workplace, or might simply become even less likely to own a car than they already are.
You arguably don't even need full self-driving for that.
A special "autonomous park/return mode", say, capped to 10kph, only following a single preprogrammed route, with a complete lead foot on the brake. Nobody would want to ride in an everyday self-drive that had those restrictions, but it's perfectly acceptable for an empty trip to a central parking structure.
it can be anywhere a short drive away and summoned at the touch of a button
The roads around where I live are /already/ at nose to tail capacity at the times I might actually want such a service. What do you think is going to happen when you add electric cars travelling from wherever they're being stored to the customer?
The electric car revolution is going to come at the same time as the self-driving revolution. That will change the calculus of parking significantly. No longer does your car need to be parked right next to your building to be convenient: it can be anywhere a short drive away and summoned at the touch of a button. So charging infrastructure doesn't have to be at every on-street location; it can be centralized to parking lots or garages on a neighborhood basis.