What Will Cars Be Like in 10 Years? Solar Paint, Self-Driving Tech and Longer-Range EVs

Imagine taking a cross-country road trip 10 years from now. After a few minutes of charging, your electric vehicle sets off while solar paint helps keep its battery topped up. The car communicates with nearby vehicles, anticipates slowdowns several cars ahead and adjusts its speed smoothly to help prevent sudden braking and dangerous swerves.

When you park for the night, the vehicle could sell excess stored energy back to the electrical grid. Or, instead of driving yourself, you could summon an autonomous taxi and take a nap in the back seat between destinations.

Some parts of that futuristic scenario may become reality within the next decade, although the timeline remains uncertain. Automakers are already adding increasingly advanced driver-assistance systems to high-end vehicles, while autonomous taxis are expanding into more U.S. cities.

Electric vehicles are also improving quickly. Longer driving ranges, lower costs and faster charging could make electric cars more practical for long-distance travel. However, not every emerging technology will reach consumer vehicles, and regulatory, economic and technical obstacles could slow adoption.

Connected cars could communicate with each other and the power grid

Some vehicles could soon interact with their surroundings in ways that go beyond conventional navigation and safety systems. Future cars may communicate with other vehicles to help avoid collisions, draw energy from natural sources and allow owners to earn money by sending unused electricity back to the grid.

Solar-powered electric vehicles

Drivers of electric vehicles may eventually spend less time searching for chargers while at work or running errands. In 2024, EV company Aptera unveiled a prototype equipped with solar panels on the hood, roof, dashboard and hatch. The vehicle can travel about 40 miles (64 kilometers) per day using solar power, which is more than the average American drives each day. It can also travel up to 400 miles (640 kilometers) on a standard electrical charge.

Some solar-powered vehicles may eventually integrate photovoltaic technology directly into their exterior rather than using conventional panels. In 2024, Mercedes-Benz revealed that it was researching photovoltaic paint that could convert sunlight into electricity for electric cars.

Mercedes-Benz calculated that, in sunny cities such as Los Angeles, the paint could generate enough energy to power a vehicle for nearly 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) per year. The tiny particles in the paint convert about 20% of sunlight into electricity, comparable to the efficiency of existing solar panels.

Electric cars could sell energy back to the grid

Future EV owners may be able to use their cars as mobile batteries. They could charge when electricity demand is low and rates are cheaper, then sell some of that stored energy back to the grid during periods of higher demand and higher prices.

Software that adjusts EV charging speeds during peak hours already exists. Drivers can use it to reduce charging costs by charging primarily during off-peak periods or to use electricity generated by solar power, said Rajit Gadh, a UCLA researcher who studies EV charging and scalability.

Sending electricity from an individual vehicle back to the grid is more complicated. Automakers and charging companies have not yet agreed on a standard way to tell vehicles when and how much energy to discharge.

“What is needed is really [for] every EV charging vendor — and every EV manufacturer, actually — to have this protocol built in, adhere to it in its full specification, and make it available,” Gadh told Live Science.

Vehicle-to-everything communication

With the right protocols, cars could eventually communicate not only with the electrical grid but also with roads, traffic infrastructure and nearby vehicles. These “vehicle-to-everything” systems could help reduce congestion and prevent collisions.

Some vehicles already use vehicle-to-vehicle, or V2V, communication. These systems use short-range radio signals to share information about a car’s speed, direction and braking patterns. The signals can travel about 1,000 feet (300 meters), allowing a vehicle to receive information from cars outside the driver’s line of sight.

V2V technology could warn drivers about approaching vehicles they cannot yet see, such as a car speeding toward an intersection or rounding a bend on a two-lane highway. However, its usefulness remains limited because relatively few vehicles are equipped with the technology.

How close are we to hands-free and autonomous driving?

Driver-assistance features such as lane-departure warnings and cruise control have been available in personal vehicles for decades. These systems still require the driver to remain in control, although they can make driving easier.

Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) mode, for example, handles many steering and braking tasks. Safe operation still requires the driver to watch the road and be ready to take over immediately.

Within the next several years, drivers are likely to see systems that automate more aspects of driving. Some technologies may allow people to take their attention off the road while remaining alert and able to regain control within a few seconds if conditions change.

A World Economic Forum white paper estimated that technologies capable of fully automating driving in many situations within defined service areas could be available in about 4% of cars on the market by 2035.

“You’re still going to have driver controls, but under certain circumstances, it will be effectively an automated vehicle,” said Luke Neurauter, who leads the Division of Vehicle, Driver and System Safety at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.

AI could help autonomous vehicles handle unusual situations

Mercedes-Benz introduced its Drive Pilot system for two consumer vehicle lines in 2022. On Germany’s Autobahn network and on certain freeways in and around Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas, the system can handle steering and maintain a vehicle’s pace in heavy traffic while the driver focuses on other activities.

As artificial intelligence models improve, autonomous vehicles may become better at handling unusual “edge cases” or “corner cases,” said Rahul Jain, an electrical and computer engineer at the University of Southern California.

Future AI systems may be better able to respond to an indecisive pedestrian entering a crossing, assess whether a flooded road is safe to enter and navigate around unexpected highway construction.

“You’re still going to have driver controls, but under certain circumstances, it will be effectively an automated vehicle.”

Luke Neurauter, Virginia Tech Transportation Institute

Driver monitoring could detect distraction, fatigue and impairment

Some systems will reduce the number of decisions a driver must make. Others will monitor the driver’s attention and issue an audible alert, indicator light or haptic warning when focus appears to be slipping.

These systems use cameras and software to track head position, eye movement and steering-wheel input. The goal is to make sure drivers remain attentive while using features such as lane centering.

Driver monitoring could eventually expand to detect fatigue or alcohol impairment. That information could determine whether certain automated features activate or change how they operate. Proposed legislation could make this technology a requirement in new vehicles as early as 2027, although technical limitations, privacy concerns and false positives could delay implementation.

The technology could also help when a driver becomes unable to operate a vehicle safely. If the car detects that the driver is asleep, experiencing a medical emergency or no longer actively controlling the vehicle, it could issue visible, audible or tactile alerts. If the driver does not respond, the vehicle might activate its hazard lights and come to a stop.

Some manufacturers are already introducing this capability. Volkswagen, for example, has made it available in all new vehicles from model year 2025.

Fully autonomous vehicles are likely to arrive first as taxis and trucks

Personal vehicles may not reach full automation within the next decade, but highly automated ride-hailing services are expected to become more common in major metropolitan areas.

In cities such as San Francisco, commuters already use autonomous vehicles operated by Waymo. The company has launched vehicles in nearly a dozen cities, including Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Los Angeles, and has announced plans to expand into more than 20 additional locations.

Other companies, including Nuro and Volkswagen’s MOIA, are testing autonomous vehicles with human drivers on board before launching full public services.

How autonomous vehicles see the road

Autonomous vehicles combine high-resolution maps with real-time information from radar, lidar, cameras and other sensors. An onboard computer uses these inputs to construct a three-dimensional map of the vehicle’s surroundings.

The cars also use AI models trained on common and unusual driving situations to predict how vehicles and pedestrians may behave and to plot a safe path forward. The cost of the sensors currently makes this technology impractical for many consumer vehicles, although prices could decline as manufacturers increase production.

Creating detailed maps is one reason autonomous taxis are not available everywhere. Mapping a region generally requires a vehicle equipped with advanced visual sensors and lasers to drive throughout the area. Cities such as San Francisco have been mapped with this level of precision, but much of the United States has not.

“It’s very difficult to do overnight,” said John Dolan, an autonomous-driving researcher at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.

Autonomous trucking could expand faster than autonomous cars

Urban environments present challenges because they contain frequent unexpected stops, pedestrians and people who may jaywalk. Interstate highways are more predictable, which could allow autonomous long-haul trucking to develop more quickly.

“[Autonomous] trucking, I would expect, would be the first thing that’s going to happen” outside major cities, Jain said.

Some driverless trucks are already operating. Pittsburgh-based Aurora deployed the technology on Interstate 45 between Dallas and Houston in 2025 and has plans to expand across the southern United States.

Longer-range EVs could make cross-country travel easier

The future of autonomous driving remains difficult to predict, but the outlook for electric vehicle batteries is somewhat clearer.

Lithium-ion batteries currently dominate the EV market. Each battery cell contains two electrodes, commonly a layered graphite electrode and a metal oxide or phosphate electrode, separated by a liquid electrolyte. Lithium ions move between the electrodes as the battery charges and discharges.

Many lithium-ion EVs can already travel more than 300 miles (480 kilometers) on a charge. That range is not always ideal for cross-country travel because charging stations can be scarce in the country’s interior, and charging takes longer than filling a vehicle with gasoline.

Solid-state batteries could offer more range and faster charging

Solid-state batteries replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid material made from ceramics, polymers or sulfides. They could allow an electric vehicle to travel more than 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) on a single charge. Some prototype battery packs have already reached that range under controlled conditions.

Pairing a solid electrolyte with a pure-lithium anode instead of graphite or hard carbon could allow a battery to store more energy than a lithium-ion cell of similar weight.

“It’ll be a fantastic commuter car, but you’re not going to go on a family trip from Montreal to California so easily.”

Eric McCalla, battery materials chemist at McGill University

Solid-state batteries may also charge more quickly. In current batteries with liquid electrolytes, charging and discharging too quickly can create dendrites — thin branches of lithium that grow across the cell and cause a short circuit.

In theory, a solid electrolyte could block dendrite formation and allow an EV to charge fully in 10 to 15 minutes. A lithium-metal anode could also provide greater range than a similarly sized lithium-ion battery, said Eric Wachsman, director of the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute at the University of Maryland.

Could sodium-ion batteries make EVs cheaper?

Many raw materials used in lithium-ion batteries are concentrated in a small number of geographic regions. In 2023, Australia, China and Chile mined about 85% of the world’s lithium supply, while China produced most of the graphite used that year. Battery materials also remain a significant part of an electric vehicle’s cost.

Sodium-ion batteries could be less expensive and easier to source. Sodium is plentiful in Earth’s crust, so it could potentially be mined in more locations, including within the United States.

Sodium-ion batteries use hard carbon electrodes because sodium ions are larger than lithium ions and cannot fit between the layers of graphite in the same way lithium ions can.

Hard carbon can be produced from materials such as sucrose or biomass, said Maximilian Fichtner, a solid-state chemist at the Helmholtz Institute Ulm for Electrochemical Energy Storage in Germany.

The drawback is that hard carbon holds less sodium than graphite holds lithium. As a result, sodium-ion batteries generally store less energy for their weight and do not last quite as long as lithium-ion batteries.

“The range won’t be as large,” McCalla told Live Science. “It’ll be a fantastic commuter car, but you’re not going to go on a family trip from Montreal to California so easily.”

Manufacturers are already bringing sodium-ion batteries to market. Chinese company CATL began mass-producing them in February and claims its battery packs can provide EV ranges of more than 250 miles (400 kilometers).

Researchers are also developing sodium-ion batteries with solid electrolytes. This approach could combine the energy-density advantages of solid-state batteries with the potential cost savings of sodium.

However, this hybrid chemistry remains in the early stages of development. “I would be surprised to see them in cars in the next decade,” McCalla told Live Science. “I’ve been surprised before, though.”

The biggest obstacles may not be technological

Longer-range EVs, solar-powered cars and autonomous vehicles represent an optimistic vision of the future. Experts say the biggest obstacles may be regulatory, economic, political and cultural rather than purely technological.

“We’re going to try to guess at a timeline of when some of these things are going to come in, and odds are, we’re going to be wrong,” McCalla told Live Science. “Odds are, we’re going to be slower than we think.”

Solar panels may not be the most economical or practical way to extend an EV’s range. Scaling up next-generation battery manufacturing could also be expensive and slow adoption. Vehicle-to-vehicle communication may remain limited if relatively few drivers own compatible vehicles.

The future of electric vehicles will likely depend heavily on affordability compared with gasoline-powered cars. Manufacturing costs and technological advances matter, but government policies — including decisions about EV incentives and charging-network subsidies — could also influence adoption.

Some automated features may create new safety risks

Automated features that drivers find convenient may not always make driving safer. A recent review found that systems focused on safety, such as automatic safety features and lane centering, tend to reduce crashes. Systems focused more on comfort, including adaptive cruise control, can increase accidents.

The researchers suggested that comfort-oriented systems may make it easier for drivers to disengage or become distracted and may cause them to overestimate what the technology can do.

Autonomous ride-hailing services also face unexpected problems. In December 2025, a power outage caused a large number of Waymo vehicles to stall and clog San Francisco intersections. The cars are programmed to treat dark traffic signals as four-way stops, but they sometimes request confirmation from human operators.

During the outage, confirmation requests increased sharply, causing delayed responses and lengthy traffic jams. Waymo says software updates now allow its vehicles to act more decisively at dark signals. However, questions remain about how autonomous fleets will respond to natural disasters, and some emergency responders have complained that autonomous vehicles can slow ambulances, fire trucks and police cars.

Regulations could determine where autonomous vehicles operate

Rules governing self-driving vehicles vary from state to state. Some states, including New York, effectively prohibit driverless vehicles. Where autonomous cars are legal, they may need higher insurance coverage and additional testing, which could slow their expansion.

“When we get into automated driving, the driving behavior is being governed by software that’s installed on a computer that’s in the vehicle,” said Steven Shladover, a research engineer at the University of California, Berkeley.

“That gets us into a messy gray area where both the federal and the state roles kind of overlap, and that’s politically very complicated.”

Different states could ultimately establish different rules for determining legal responsibility after a crash involving an automated vehicle.

In 10 years, you may be able to travel from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in an autonomous vehicle. But if you want to drive to New York City, you might have to stop in New Jersey and take a train into the city.