At this front leader is India and China. Tatu in India is doing stuff like gluing car parts together. And China has huge fleet of electric vehicles and recharging stations, in form of electric bikes.
here's an energy-consumption versus speed plot from MacKay's "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" book:
http://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_128.shtml
i reckon "everyone needs their own car" is nonsense. sure, a nice aspirational goal for the middle-class consumer world, but increasingly irrelevant as we update our thinking to match reality
edit: to give a tiny personal anecdote, i live in a city with decent public transport and haven't owned a car for over 5 years, and don't plan on getting one any time soon. i don't use taxis / uber either, it isn't necessary.
> i reckon "everyone needs their own car" is nonsense
Similarly we could see a large decrease in the need for at-work and on-street parking if a car can take itself off home. Perhaps there might be a rise in commercial car-parks scattered around a city where a car can retire to safety and for a charge while it awaits its next job. A clever car could pick the most efficient of those to be ready for all users.
The biggest concern I have about the rise of the electric car is that we are currently doing little about the cleanliness & CO2 emissions of our electricity generation. Clean/safe nuclear power can't come quickly enough.
Innovation, just because it does not occur where you think it should does not mean the traditional automakers are not constantly innovation. It is the reliance on many suppliers that allows for innovation to move ahead quickly. All this work towards self driving cars came from developments made by the industry in making safer cars, from ABS to traction control to self aiming lights to airbags.
Electrification, the odd thing here is that Tesla kept a 12v system when many have been trying to move all cars to 48v. I think the author is too quick to dismiss the big companies, look how fast GM turned up with the 200 mile range Bolt which should debut before Tesla's III, let alone probably reach higher production numbers
Software, the author seems wholly tied up in interfaces. Why do many cars have all these dials? Assurance for the most part and a lot of tradition. Plus they aren't distracting, they are causal glance information sources whereas pretty screens and graphics likely will be distracting.
Oh, as for quoting Lutz, while he may not be your cup of tea the guy knows the current industry and how it all works. He does come off like a politician at times and keeps his name in the press by being loud