The Last Mile: Are Solar-Powered Autonomous Cars Around the Bend?

The many possible futures of driving hang thick in the air. Between dwindling oil stores and a booming global population, between auto trailblazers like Tesla's sleek sold-out Model S's and Google's self-driving prototypes, we're steering through an electrified garden of forking highways. In coming years, roads could be packed with fully electric cars, fully automated cars, even fully hydrogen-powered or road-trained cars. Or no cars.

So no automaker, it seems, wants to be caught without a vision for the wheeled tomorrow. Ford, for instance, has launched a pair of high-tech Hail Marys over the last month: Its own autonomous vehicle, back in December, and now, a solar-powered hybrid plug-in outfitted with silicon panels right on the roof. The Ford C-MAX Solar Energi concept car gets an estimated EPA mileage rating of 100 mpg, and its rooftop array is capable of generating 300 watts.

But the interesting thing about the new concept car, which, according to Ars Technica will be on display at CES this year, isn't the rooftop panels. We've seen those before, and they're still too small to play a serious role in powering the engine. But the car is designed to be parked underneath a canopy fitted with a Fresnel Lens made out of acrylics, which will concentrate the sun's rays on the panels and deliver a more formidable charge.

And now, friends, we're talking. Now an intriguing vision of how cars might work in the far, or not-too-too-far but certainly resource constrained future, drifts into view—one in which autonomous, solar powered cars help solve the vaunted last mile problem. With the magnifying effect of an Energi canopy, the sun's rays should be able to sustainably power a fleet of around-the-town robo-taxis.

See, not everyone gets a car in a 9 billion-strong civilization; it'd be insane even to try. So that means more mass transportation, a la China's megacities, with bullet trains or bus rapid transit or eventually maybe even something resembling a Hyperloop. But that leaves us with a few billion people who still have to schlep home from the mass transit stop, and a last mile to traverse through the urban jungle—and that's where on-demand autonomous renewable energy-powered automobiles would come in handy. The short trips would be ideal for solar charging, and efficiency gained from automation could further conserve power.

More immediately, solar-powered self-driving autos could be nice for folks like current day Amtrak and LIRR riders who might eschew car ownership altogether if there was a comfortable personal home delivery mechanism waiting for them when they reached their train stop. The cars could soak up the sun until commuters come home, and deliver the wearied workaday everymen directly to their doorsteps.

This tantalizing possibility was first raised in earnest early last year, when Tesla's Elon Musk toured Google's automated car program, and declared that he wanted to make an "autopilot" Tesla. And since Google has invested heavily in Uber, it seems clear that the search giant is aligning its auto-cars for shared use. Later in the year, Japan granted a driver's license to the autonomous electric concept version of the all-electric Nissan Leaf.

Now a single company, Ford, has unveiled two separate future forward car concepts within a month—is it only a matter of time before they get around to combining the tech of each? Will Tesla or Google or Tesla and Google try solar in their autopilot prototypes?

Automated suburban car travel, in other words, may not be all that far off—and given recent advances in efficiency, and the plummeting cost of solar panels, it's not a stretch to imagine room for a sun-powered version, either.

Sure, it's ultimately a pretty utopian transportation vision, this interlocking system of efficient mass transit combined with renewable energy-powered automated local travel pods, but it's one that actually makes a certain amount of sense. Building autopilot cars for everyone would essentially turn our roadways into less-efficient trains, after all; the key will be improving the sustainability of cars where we can really use them—in that last mile.