True...up north where it's cold and snowy...electric vehicles cannot ever produce the heat required to defrost ice on windows or heat the interior of a vehicle without killing the battery. Only the warmer parts of the country will have them....and there won't be many... as they've already shown the greenhouse emissions of electric vehicles are equal to combustion engines. (i.e.) The electric to recharge comes from the energy of oil, even the electric recharge stations, batteries and total electric car manufacturing are attached to the energy of oil. Density of power generated from batteries is currently not enough. Only 3 to 4 hours of driving time before next charge is required...people and trucking cannot live with that time line.
Electric vehicle will propagate slowly in southern regions long before autonomous driver-less vehicles ever show up on the roads. As an engineer, I can guarantee we won't be seeing driver-less automated vehicles for the next 20 or 30 years....reasoning the human factor cannot be duplicated, they can only follow road laws. They can't see or handle snow and ice, they can't see drunk drivers are quickly speeding up to an intersection and might go through it, they can't see an old lady walking out in front of your car, they can't see a baby carriage, they can't predict where a person in a car might swing the car door open, they are dumbfounded when two or three cars come up to a 4 way at the same time...there's not enough short or long range vision sensors onboard, there's no predicative intelligence, it only tries to follow road laws. Once people are fully aware what an automated driverless vehicle REALLY SEES AND DETECTS and how dumb the controls really are....they will never allow those cars on the road. Even in 2060, these driverless cars (with enhanced vision and sensor) coming onto the roads will HAVE TO BE CLEARLY LABEL as such...so that regular people driving can make allowances for the driverless deficiencies!!! Driver Education classes will have questions about automated vehicles and their deficiencies. Trust me...I'm an engineer...wrote the white paper on driverless vehicles and stating the technology and sensors were not ready and would be a big mistake-accidents galore since we could not duplicate the human element of driving. Clearly a few clueless-clever engineers suckered the big automakers to build and try automated vehicles on the road. Few weeks later a driverless car being tested, on it's third day, ran over woman stepping out into the street and killed her. Imagine that set their expectations back to reality.
