I put up a post yesterday about the spiffy new Supercharger stations built by Tesla Motors, but most of the news regarding alterna-cars in America in the last 24 hours has been mixed at best. Tesla itself is falling far short of its near-term manufacturing goals and Toyota, king of the hybrid with the Prius, announced it was largely abandoning the electric category. The one bright spot was that California legalized driverless cars, many of which will be electric. And that’s a state where such vehicles could thrive.

The obstacles to electric vehicles are gigantic because of the lack of infrastructure. Imagine if Steve Jobs had dreamed up the iPod but there were no outlets in your home to charge them, so Apple also had to build power sources. One thing that makers of electric autos should do is pool resources to create universal filling stations or outfit existing fossil fuel stations with a universal electrical outlet. The early electric cars are ideal for urban areas because of their relatively limited travel capacity, and most city dwellers don’t have garages in which to power their cars. Stations have to be ubiquitous, uniform and simple.

The challenges for automatic autos are psychological as well as foundational. Americans who feel like they don’t have great control over the rest of their lives have long enjoyed a sense of empowerment and freedom from being behind the wheel of their cars. (Picture America Graffiti with driverless cars.) So the obstacles are technological as well as those of hearts and minds.

From a Forbes article about California’s new driverless cars law: “California Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday signed a law making it legal for driverless cars to travel on public roadways, demonstrating once again that the Left Coast has a way of prodding automakers to innovate faster.

It’s not that smart minds in Detroit, Japan and Germany aren’t already working on autonomous cars. They’ve been doing so for years. But as with most new technologies, automotive engineers want to make absolutely certain that they’re safe and perform as expected before launching into mass production. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration agrees, of course, which is why it recently launched the first real-world test of vehicle-to-vehicle communication near Ann Arbor, Mich.

But Google, which has already developed a fleet of driverless cars that some of its employees use to commute to work, was eager to press ahead. It lobbied heavily for the California law, which would allow testing of autonomous vehicles on the state’s roadways as long as there’s a fully licensed human in the driver’s seat to take over if needed.”