Batteries and autopilot

Driverless cars. Computer driven cars. Cars with Autopilot. Whatever you want to call them; Autopiloted cars have been around for a little while - before battery powered cars were considered mainstream. So the first autopilot cars with a lot of press were ICE powered. But generally autopilot only become street-worthy roughly the same time as BEV's have become more popular. But they aren't intrinsically connected.

Still, autopilot is a natural fit for BEV because Tesla jumped into the autopilot game with both feet. And they are a media favorite so whatever happens, good or bad, we will hear about it connected with the Model S.

And as far as autopilot cars go, the Tesla version is considered quite good. There have been a few crashes but people seem to want autopilot so they give as much charity to the problems as possible. It's similar to the batteries themselves - we risk li-ion fires just to get the best energy density and power density when safer chemistries are only a handful of percentage points lower in performance.

As soon as magnetic drive gets the battery it really needs to be a better economic choice over ICE vehicles, it will be the future. And autopilot will probably be the future, too. Why is that? Because they are already considered to be "nice drivers." And in our PC world, that translates to a mandate. There will come a time when people behind the wheel will be considered less safe than autopiloted cars and so autopilot will be required to drive.

All our current software and processing power isn't enough to handle all driving conditions. So total autopilot won't happen for a long time. That's why controlled inner-city areas will be the first to transform into areas that have few or no human-driven cars. And probably the few human drive cars will only be allowed with a permit. This will expand farther out of cities until controlled areas that only allow autopilot are connected.

Will there still be crashes? Certainly. But there will be less than before. And in many inner city areas traffic will speed up because all the cars will coordinate with each other. It sounds like a lot of upside for little downside. But there are a few downsides. One is that central control, a requirement for any network, will limit freedom to travel. And costs may be somewhat high for a rather long time until controlled spaces are connected and less expensive options are allowed.