I was in New York during Hurricane Sandy. I was staying in a hotel and the power was out. The morning after the storm I went outside to see what was going on. There was a big CNN truck with a dish and a big crowd.

I thought "maybe the mayor is speaking to the media" and walked over. Turns out the crowd was people charging their phone from the truck. CNN generously left the truck running there for a couple of days.

Actually that would be really cool with self-driving cars, have a "tanker car" pull up next to you to extend the range for long-range "sorties"...

While you're driving, mid-air refueling style. Better make the link-up all in the same lane, though.

Autonomous cars will already line up together to get the slipstream efficiency; take it an extra step further and you could have a battery tanker-truck up front giving everyone in the convoy a charge and also making their travel more efficient.

And share the energy from regenerative breaking downhill, and much more.

At least, just like cyclists, they can rotate through who gets the front to equalize energy usage.

I foresee large-ish autonomous battery packs in the form of cars, rather than trucks, simply because they can go to more places at once.

Dang it! I'm ahead of my time but five years late.