In general, the auto industry and cars, in particular, haven’t been good for the environment. In a few years from now, self-driving cars will appear all around the globe. The trouble is that producing an electric self-driving car requires making a few trade-offs. The major problem is that electric vehicles have a limited range. The on-board sensors and computers of self-driving vehicles need a lot of energy, which isn’t great for the car’s range.

The trade-offs for autonomous electric vehicles aren’t as painful as once thought. Every industry needs to change sometimes. The auto industry has had and still has many constant changes going on. Still, this change is pretty significant. It shows that AVs can contribute to the global car market’s being more environmentally friendly and showing how important this is for us.

There is an internal debate within the auto industry on whether to power the first self-driving vehicles with electricity. This divide is a reminder that autonomy is both a research project and a potential multi-trillion-dollar business.

Different players in the industry see other routes to the market. In other words, the ideal self-driving business model is far from finalized.

Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, has been going after a fully autonomous electric car for a long time. And not long ago, he once again declared that the company could achieve that goal in 2021.

Researchers say that simple changes could make electric vehicles a better fit for self-driving automobiles. Due to constant starts and stops and to the number of computations required to control them, researchers found and programmed vehicles to drive more smoothly and save some of that energy. In the US suburbs, where driving is often faster, the aerodynamics of a car is a more significant issue, and unwieldy sensors like lidar reduce the range by 5 to 10 percent.

Finally

There’s lots of work to do around autonomous cars, and it’s not all related to technology. The questions are: How much would people be willing to pay for autonomy? And how quickly would they adopt this change? These are two questions whose answers the industry overseeing self-driving tech is interested in.