Electric Vehicles EVs

Autonomous cars are a viable future state that ends car ownership and promotes cars as a per journey device, not a per owner device.

People like owning their own car which doesn't have other people's germs in and has their special stuff in the boot (I always have a towel and swimming trunks just in case I find somewhere interesting to swim).

Autonomous cars will be a disaster when they circle the block while the owner is at the dentist rather than pay for a parking spot.

I agree with all of that but it's hard to ignore that an EV uses 10x as much copper as an ICE vehicle (before taking in to account all the copper in the charging infrastructure), if all the UK's cars switched to EV it would use 12% of the current global copper supply. Hopefully full automation will reduce the number needed like you say but just switching everything to EV isn't a magic bullet. We may acquire a better quality of life but are shifting the environmental problems and poor working conditions on to other parts of the world. It all needs to be part of a broader strategy but instead we will just expand mining operations and start strip mining the ocean floor.

EVs are the next step in car evolution. They all contain more autonomous systems than last gen cars.

Autonomous cars are a viable future state that ends car ownership and promotes cars as a per journey device, not a per owner device.

Autonomous cars end the need for residential roads to be parking lots and reduces the total required car numbers, by eliminating the need for redundant parked vehicles.

This is a more optimistic outlook, and I would like to see things evolve in this direction. Observing current trends however I don't see EVs reducing consumer desire to personally own large, powerful, comfortable vehicles, or reducing the massive amount of money to be made by producing them.