When most people think of the inner workings of cars, they think of loud engines, filling up with liquid fuel and lots of moving parts. While these may make for great memories for motorheads, fossil fuel powered cars may themselves be a memory very soon.

The first popular, mainstream electric car, pictured above – the Model S. It has self-driving technology built in.

Electric

Many manufacturers are following suit and producing electric vehicles.

There are clear advantages to electric cars: they are environmentally friendly, thanks to the possibility of using renewable energy. With fossil fuel based cars, the petrol or diesel is necessary for the engine to run. With electric cars, batteries are used, and yes, some of the power may be produced at power plants that burn fossil fuel, but in the long run, it’s possible to move to renewable sources.

One downside that gets bandied around a lot is range.

Fossil fuel based cars typically have ranges of 600 km or over, depending on the size of the car and the fuel tank. Electric vehicles have been limited to around 100 km in the past, and although Tesla have configured their battery storage in a way that allows for more, it hasn’t reached traditional range as yet.

Superchargers and charging stations

Tesla’s superchargers change the game significantly here. Imagine being directed towards a Supercharger via GPS when your batteries are running low, and having multiple superchargers in every country, effectively making the range issue a non-issue.

Other companies also have charging stations, and it isn’t difficult to imagine a standard being agreed upon, similar to mobile phone chargers using mini-USB. Once that happens, electric cars may well completely take over market share.

Self-driving

Several companies have announced self driving car plans.

Some car manufacturers have even partnered with app companies like Uber and Lyft, and the speed of development has been staggering.

Combine the two

If you take electric car technology and self-driving technology and combine them, it’s not hard to imagine a world where people don’t drive their own cars, but rather, if they do own them, they add them to networked “Car Pools” and collect money from them every month, whilst using the same car pools to do most of their travel.

While there will always be motorheads who own and drive their own vehicles, it may be that the vast majority of the population won’t bother either owning or driving cars in the near future.