Despite being one of the most talked-about car manufacturers in the world, Tesla is still a relatively small player in the auto industry. Despite this, the company has already made significant progress toward its goal of drastically reducing emissions from personal transportation.
In just over a decade, Tesla has gone from producing a limited number of high-end electric cars to manufacturing its own reasonably affordable electric vehicles. It’s also set up Supercharger stations around North America and Europe, enabling owners to drive their cars from coast to coast—and even further. But what comes next?
How will Tesla continue to change the way the world drives? Here are three ways we think they’ll do it:
Fully-Autonomous Driving
One of the biggest challenges facing the future of electric cars is the need for a robust charging infrastructure. While the need for gasoline stations is on the decline, there are still a lot of questions about how electric cars will be charged—and where.
The biggest issue is that not every road has a charging station, and even those that do may not be compatible with certain types of electric cars. Fully-autonomous driving will solve all of these issues. Gone would be the days of worrying about the range and how many hours it’ll take to “fill up.”
Instead, you’d plug in your car—or it would automatically—and then do something else. You’d return when the car was ready to go again, and Tesla’s network of autonomous Superchargers would mean you could do it almost anywhere.
More Electric Vehicles
Even if fully-autonomous driving is the future, that doesn’t mean today’s EVs will be able to take advantage of it. Tesla is facing a lawsuit from a customer who claims his Model 3 is unsafe because Tesla has yet to enable Full Self-Driving.
That’s not to say there aren’t other EVs coming out. We’ll see more EVs from Tesla, but other car makers are also starting to see the advantages of electric power. Aston Martin, for example, just announced a new “zero emissions” electric car at the Paris Motor Show, and even Porsche has been rumored to be working on an electric sports car.
While there’s no way to know how quickly the industry will shift towards more EVs, it’s clear that EVs are here to stay, and the only question is how quickly they’ll become the norm.
Build Smarter Infrastructure
As much as electric cars have changed over the last decade, our infrastructure remains unchanged. That’s especially true when it comes to our power grid and the way we generate electricity. Given that EVs produce fewer emissions than conventional cars, they could easily be part of the solution to reducing greenhouse gases, but they’re not.
That’s large because we haven’t built an infrastructure to take advantage of their benefits. That said, Tesla is at the forefront of this change. The company has been investing in solar energy for years, and over the last few months, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk has been talking about a “global utility.” That utility would bring together solar power, batteries, and Tesla cars to create a sustainable infrastructure capable of powering the planet.
Conclusion
Tesla is still a relatively young company and has already done a lot to disrupt the automotive industry, but these are just the first few ways we think Tesla will change the way the world drives.
From fully-autonomous driving to more EVs on the road and sustainable energy infrastructure, future Teslas will do a lot more to reduce emissions and improve transportation.