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That could probably be made to work today, with the gear used by container cranes to slot containers onto ships, trucks, and railroad cars. It would be more complicated than the snake, because stabilizing a hanging load is hard. Once in a while it would probably scratch the car body.

What a lot of people here aren't getting is that snake robots are mechanically simple. They're unusual, but neither complex nor expensive to manufacture.

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Would the claw still work if it was coated in soft rubber?

Alternately, I'm imagining the cute-but-ridiculous solution of making the claw and the car magnetically repel one another, so as it the claw plumb-bobs downward and swings toward the car, it just sort of naturally veers away from the surface, rocking around it in an arc until it stabilizes.

Make it so that the magnet is recessed inside a rim of soft plastic or rubber. Then it will still be able to slot onto the charge port but will not be able to hit the car body.

T-600s were covered in rubber - turned out people could spot them easily, so they were poor infiltrators.

Tesla should consider covering these with living tissue to make them more palatable to humans.

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