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Originally Posted by Damien
A bit beyond moving to electric, which I think will happen sooner than 2040, but I believe car ownership itself won't be around for long. Instead people will call self-driving cars and be assigned one from a fleet owned by Google/Apple/Uber etc which will complete their journey then zip off somewhere else. With these cars being active more than most cars are now the cost per trip could be far less than what we effectively pay now for ownership, fuel, maintenance and insurance.
The benefits are massive: Less space will be required for parking as we would have fewer cars and those not active could go to a remote place rather than near town centers etc.
It's much safer as these cars could go faster, react quicker and make fewer mistakes than humans do plus they could communicate with each other. Imagine all these cars being networked and able to make adjustments to their speed/mapping based on the load of other cars up ahead.
It would solve this problem of charging as you no longer worry about parking or re-fueling cars.
I think before too long it will seem crazy that humans spent large amounts of money to own cars which spent most of their time parked and were driven by humans with their slow reaction times and who used signals to communicate to each other about their intentions.
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The big fly in the ointment of your vision is legal accountability, the likes of uber won't pay out when their cars kill and injure people, that's why they'll need a bum on a seat for the foreseeable future and there not as safe as people make out, when a driver less car was responsible for someone's death the CEO justified it as a tragedy but the car had done 250k miles without incident and the assembled press nodded at how impressive a feat that was without seemingly considering how many people they'd killed in their quarter of a million miles motoring.