The appeal of autonomous vehicle technology goes beyond the Batmobile appeal of driverless cars. Analysts say autonomous vehicles will likely produce efficiency and environmental benefits, which may explain why everyone from Tesla to Apple and Google are jumping on this low-emission, driverless bandwagon.

"Right now, autonomous vehicles are all at the prototype or early product stage, so we don't really know exactly what benefits there will be, if any. That said there are good reasons to believe that autonomous vehicles will have a lot of environmental benefits that we can try to estimate and model," says Mark Bünger, Lux Research's vice president of research.

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