Want to Make an All-Star Electric Truck? Drop the Driver

Look at just about any rendering or essayistic sketch of the world’s transportation future, and you’ll notice two things about the cars, trucks, vans, and whatever elses tootling around the roads: They drive themselves and they run on electricity. The funny thing about that pairing is that there’s no inherent relationship between a vehicle’s ability to drive itself and what it uses to move its wheels.