I'm bearish on both self-driving and the universal adoption of electric cars, but everyone will be plugging their car in at home long before they can make one that drives itself to the gas station.

Absolutely not. Having to wait for hours to get a few kms of driving distance is way too much of a friction point for EVs to ever be more than a novelty, in addition to the usual complaints of people with only street parking, garages without outlets, etc. Either we'll get the battery-swap situation rolling or invent a faster charging tech, but either way there'll be some sort of "station" in the picture.

I realize that a lot of people here are privileged enough to own a single family home, but the majority of humanity lives in apartments and parks on the street. Trickle-charging at home is not a universal solution. The only practical solution seems to be some form of rapid charging of the car's energy storage. Either by pumping huge amounts of amps into a huge battery pack, or adding some kind of chemical fuel that gets reacted in an internal combustion engine or a fuel cell.

At the moment, policy in Amsterdam is that if you own an electric car, you get a charging point in your street. I don't know how fast those are, but they don't have to be fast. They're still useful for overnight charging, especially if the city continues to add more when more people get electric cars. I don't understand the argument that this is not in any way a solution. It is.

Not sure that's what the self-driving cars proponents envisioned though.