Your eyes are on the stunning scenery, taking in the vistas along Route 66 or the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, or you're catching up on messages. Your hands barely touch the wheel, and your foot doesn't push a pedal. Your car communicates with others on the road, so there's no need to brake suddenly or swerve. That's because it knows a vehicle five cars up from you has done so, and all those in between are slowing at exactly the right pace to avoid dramatic changes in trajectory.
Some of that scenario may become a reality in the next 10 years, at least for those who are using the most cutting-edge cars on the market. Although there's some heavy speculation involved in that futuristic vision, vehicle manufacturers are already incorporating increasingly sophisticated automated driving technology into high-end personal vehicles, and self-driving taxis are coming to dozens of U.S. cities.
Some car models within the next decade may interact with their surroundings in new ways, including by communicating with other cars to avoid collisions, drawing energy from natural sources, or letting drivers get paid for sending their cars' unused energy back to the grid.
Some researchers are developing technology to connect cars on the road, which could make for smoother braking and less traffic. (Image credit: lupengyu via Getty Images)Some sunlight-powered cars might ditch the solar panels altogether in favor of a more integrated design. In 2024, Mercedes-Benz revealed it was researching a photovoltaic paint that could convert sunlight into energy for electric cars. In sunny cities such as Los Angeles, the company calculated, the paint could draw in enough energy to power the car for nearly 7,500 miles (12,000 km) per year. The tiny particles in the paint convert about 20% of the energy from sunlight into electricity, which is comparable to the efficiency of existing solar panels.
Standardized software programs that throttle EV charging speeds during peak hours already exist. Drivers can use them if, for example, they want to keep charging costs down by primarily charging their cars during off-peak hours when electricity costs are lower, or if they want to use electricity only from solar power to charge, said Rajit Gadh, a researcher who studies EV charging and scalability at UCLA. But the process for sending energy back to the grid is a different story. Individual manufacturers haven't yet landed on a standard way to tell cars when and how much energy to discharge, Gadh said.
With the right protocols, though, cars of the future will be able to do more than interface with the electrical grid. "Vehicle-to-everything" technologies could enable cars to communicate with infrastructure and other vehicles to avoid traffic and collisions.
V2V systems could help reduce traffic collisions by warning drivers about oncoming cars they can't see yet — for example, by alerting a driver to another car speeding toward an intersection or coming around a bend as the driver is passing another vehicle on a twisty, two-lane highway. Not all cars have the technology, though, so its practical utility is limited for now.
Hands off the wheel; eyes off the road
Some of these features will allow drivers to take their attention off the road entirely and enjoy some in-car entertainment, as long as they're alert and able to retake control of the vehicle within a few seconds if conditions change. Technologies that fully automate driving in many circumstances within certain service areas will likely be in about 4% of cars on the market by 2035, according to a white paper from the World Economic Forum.
Mercedes-Benz introduced its Drive Pilot system for two consumer car lines in 2022. On the entire German Autobahn network and on certain freeways between and around Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas, during heavy traffic, the system lets the driver turn their attention toward other activities, such as reading a book or eating lunch, while the car handles steering and keeping pace with other nearby vehicles.
You're still going to have driver controls, but under certain circumstances, it will be effectively an automated vehicle.
Future AI systems might "have some reasoning ability, and then because of that, it can handle these corner cases much better than current systems are able to do," Jain told Live Science. For example, a car might be able to better respond to an indecisive pedestrian who suddenly enters a crossing, assess whether to enter potentially hazardous conditions such as flooded roads, or safely navigate around unusual circumstances, such as construction work, on a highway.
In addition to looking for distracted driving, the technology might expand to monitor drivers for fatigue and alcohol impairment, he added. That information could then affect "whether or not other features become active, or change how they act, based on the driver state at that moment in time," Neurauter said. Proposed legislation could make this technology a requirement in new vehicles as early as 2027, but technological hurdles and concerns over privacy and false positives could stall its implementation.
While personal cars may not offer full automation, highly automated car services will become much more common as rideshare vehicles in major metro areas. In some cities, like San Francisco, commuters already rely heavily on autonomous vehicles from Waymo. The company has rolled out its cars in nearly a dozen cities — including Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Los Angeles — and has announced plans to expand service to more than 20 additional locales. Other companies — such as Nuro and Volkswagen’s MOIA — are testing their vehicles with human drivers on board before rolling out full public service.
Autonomous cars are rolling out in new regions at a rapid pace, but a patchwork of laws and regulations governing self-driving cars may affect whether they wind up in a city near you. (Image credit: Marc Dufresne via Getty Images)Developing those high-resolution maps takes time, which is one of the main reasons autonomous rideshares aren’t available everywhere yet. Mapping usually involves decking out a car with high-end visual sensors and lasers and driving it throughout the region. Although cities like San Francisco have been mapped with this level of precision, much of the U.S. has not.
Complexities also tend to arise in city environments, where unexpected stops are more common and there are many pedestrians who behave unpredictably or jaywalk. But interstate highway driving doesn't face as many of those obstacles, and that could enable autonomous long-haul drives.
Longer range and faster charging
While there's speculation involved in predicting the range of self-driving capabilities available in a decade, the picture for EVs is a little clearer.
Many electric cars with lithium-ion batteries can already travel more than 300 miles (480 km) on a charge. But that's not ideal for a long-range car trip, because charging stations are few and far between in the country's vast interior and charging takes longer than filling up a gas tank.
It'll be a fantastic commuter car, but you're not going to go on a family trip from Montreal to California so easily.
Solid-state batteries may also enable faster charging. In current batteries that use liquid electrolytes, charging and discharging the battery too quickly can cause dendrites, thin branches of lithium that stretch across the cell and short-circuit the battery. A solid electrolyte could, in theory, block those dendrites, which would enable cars to charge fully in just 10 to 15 minutes. The higher energy density from a lithium metal anode also translates to a greater range than that from a similarly sized lithium-ion battery, Eric Wachsman, director of the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute at the University of Maryland, told Live Science.
Sodium-ion batteries could be cheaper and easier to source. Sodium is plentiful in Earth's crust, which means mining could be done throughout the U.S., potentially with a comparatively low environmental impact.
I would be surprised to see them in cars in the next decade. I've been surprised before, though.
"When you cook at home and your soup boils over and you get this black ring around your pot, this is hard carbon," Maximilian Fichtner, a solid-state chemist at the Helmholtz Institute Ulm for Electrochemical Energy Storage in Germany, told Live Science. "You can produce this from sucrose or from biomass, from whatever. You can do that everywhere."
"The range won't be as large," McCalla told Live Science. "It'll be a fantastic commuter car, but you're not going to go on a family trip from Montreal to California so easily."
But new technologies are being developed rapidly. For example, some scientists are making sodium-ion batteries that use solid electrolytes, combining the higher energy density of solid-state lithium batteries with the cost savings of sodium batteries.
Bumps in the road
The future we're describing is the utopian scenario. But the biggest obstacles are likely not technological but rather regulatory, economic, political or cultural, experts said.
Solar panels may not wind up being the most economic or practical way to increase EVs' range, while scaling up manufacturing capacity for next-generation batteries is expensive and could slow EV adoption in the U.S. The utility of vehicle-to-vehicle communications, meanwhile, could be limited by a slow rollout and adoption of V2V-equipped cars among drivers.
One challenge for manufacturers is that the automated features drivers prefer may not always be safer. A recent review of automated systems found that those focused on driver safety, such as automatic safety or lane centering, tend to reduce crashes, while those focused on comfort, such as adaptive cruise control, can increase accidents. The authors proposed that such systems make it easier for people to disengage or become distracted while driving and possibly overestimate the capabilities of the system.
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"When we get into automated driving, the driving behavior is being governed by software that's installed on a computer that's in the vehicle," Steven Shladover, a research engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, told Live Science. "That gets us into a messy gray area where both the federal and the state roles kind of overlap, and that's politically very complicated." For example, different states could end up with different rules for establishing who's legally responsible for an accident involving automated driving.
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