“Something I’d like to do, which I think many of our engineers will be hearing this in real-time, is have the charge connector plug itself in. Like an articulating, like sort of a snake, like Metal Gear Solid or something.”
Realistically though, why not just have some sort of hard-arm extend? why the flexibility of a snake? with a little bit of OCR and an arm that can extend in length and rotate on an axis, it seems like you could get pretty close
They could have the driver pull up into a generalized box/circle, and move the car forward automatically (polling with a laser (or OCR on the side of the charger) until it was in the perfect spot to be reachable.
If cars can parallel park themselves, I think they can manage pulling up a given amount of feet.
Also a little rotation on the car-facing end of the charger would help.