I believe mass car transport has a lot of problems, where the tailpipe exhaust emissions is only one of them. While electric cars does indeed solve the latter, I do agree that buying a Tesla in order to be "green" hardly make any sense.
Another problem that seems to be soon resolved is the dependency of an human driver to concentrate on the task of driving. This is a safety hazard (as humans are generally bad at driving), a hell of a lot of human-hours are spent behind the wheel, and since it's a big insurance cost involved when renting cars, that's also quite expensive. Well, some people actually like driving, they will probably not be able to see my point.
One thing that will happen once we get truly autonomous self-driving cars is that the cost of taxi transportation will fall a lot - after all the driver is the driving cost of using a taxi. With this, private car ownership will decline - there is not that much of a point to have a private car if one can get a car cheaply within few minutes simply by pressing a button. It's even better, as one can order a car with big luggage space or a car with space for 8 people or whatever one needs ... rather than having to do daily commutes to work with a car designed for going for holidays with the full family.
This doesn't mean Tesla is a scam, it may very well happen that Tesla will get a dominant position in this market, after all Tesla is one of the major players when it comes to research into autonomous vehicles.
In my opinion, we could have had networks of electric self-driving vehicles some ten years ago if there had been a strong political will for it; there were already experiments done with self-driving cars in the 80s, and there are dozens upon dozens of well-researched ideas for autonomous vehicles. If one has a separate right-of-way for autonomous vehicles, has well-working protocols for vehicle-to-vehicle-communication, infrastructure meant for machine-to-machine communication rather than road signs and traffic lights meant to be seen and understood by humans, autonomous driving is trivial. Once it's a requirement that the autonomous vehicle should navigate in mixed traffic and read and interpret road signs meant for humans, "autonomous driving" gets into a very hard AI-problem. I'm actually very surprised that self-driving cars has gotten as far as they have.
The problem is mostly with inertia, we do have a well-established road network, we do have a lot of regulations detailing what is a "car" and what is not (and if something doesn't follow the regulations and cannot be classified as a "car", "bike", "motorbike", etc, it simply cannot use the public roads), we do have a lot of car-owners who love their cars, there is a lot of staked economic interest in keeping status-quo, etc. Hence I think it's unlikely to see the cars go away in the near future.
Ten years ago, I would have expected some hybrid technology to come to the rescue, vehicles that would be fully autonomous when driving on infrastructure built for it, but could be used as an ordinary car on the roads.
I believe that cars and driving habits will change greatly before self-driving becomes actually a thing
https://steemit.com/selfdrivingcar/@builderofcastles/self-driving-cars-a-technology-destined-for-failure
Self-driving systems are a long way from actually being a reality.
But, if you believe the hype from the TV, they are already here.
You know that girl with bicycle that got hit recently?
That is because of the current state of software. The programs cannot accurately plot bike pathing, so currently they IGNORE bikes. So, the program said to itself, the bicycle isn't there, and drove through that "empty" space.
And Tesla is using the best of 1970s technology. I read a book from then that told of how to build a Tesla. Technology has been seriously held back. That is why we haven't seen any hybrid technology come to the rescue.
I completely agree.
Tesla may have a big market share of the future autonomous cars. That does not mean that we need political action to update private driving to electric cars. This amount of cars that we still currently need will be completely redundant in the next 10 years. I think we should drive our current cars until they are complete waste. I certainly do not intend to by another car in my life and hope my current one will survive long enough :)
I guess my title is a little on the provocative side. I do not think that future cars will run on combustion at all. I just think that there will be far fewer of them.
As a child I thought that ... "one day we will look back to the 1900s and we will consider it equally unacceptable to release car exhaust to the air as to deface in the drinking water".
At one hand, things have gradually become better. We're no longer adding tetraethyl lead to the petrol, we have catalytic converters on the petrol cars removing most of the soot, CO and NOx from the exhaust ... as well as particle filters on most of the diesel cars.
At the other hand, air pollution is becoming a bigger and bigger problem worldwide, mostly in the urban centers but even on the country side - and no nations seems to be spared. It has become an acknowledged fact that air pollution is reducing the life span, the last I saw was even some research pointing out that people lose intelligence by being exposed to air pollution! And then I even haven't touched CO2, greenhouse effect, acidification of the oceans as well as the problems with extracting oil from shale, etc ...
pollution is a huge problem and one that does not have easy solutions.
Current politics has demonstrated to be completely unable to deal with it. My best hope is that technology will sort things out by providing cleaner and more efficient options, but that does not have to go that way.
Another hope is that we can get rid of our inflationary monetary system that is at the root of our economy of never ending growth in an age of abundance.
Some way this planet needs to get back to sanity, but I do not see a clear way forward.
Remember tomorrowland...