Yup - I think most of my usual points have already been covered, but I'll brainstorm a little...
Is the electric charging infrastructure already everywhere (we are North America focused, so let's say there) - all across the continental U.S. and Canada? In rural areas?
Do you have electric service at your home? If yes, then you have the charging infrastructure.
Pretty sure that 99% of single family homes (if not closer to 99.9%) in the USA have the necessary electric charging infrastructure.
Assuming that it is uncommon to have apartment complexes and condos in rural areas, I think rural is covered.
Apartments in California, for the most part, have electric vehicle charging "spots" available. More of this will be needed across the US.
You have to realize the old paradigm of a gas station on every corner is not how electric vehicles work. By the time "electric vehicles take over the world" it won't be an issue, because necessary charging infrastructure will be put in to meet demand because this is a case of no infrastructure really needed to start ownership of electric vehicles and beyond a certain breaking point, gas stations close down their gas services due to lack of profitability and only sell snacks while installing charging points.
Short of labor making service industry a place to cut costs, will autonomous driving be clearly less expensive for most people? If you have an 8 year old gas car that costs $0.20/mile, how much will it cost to replace that car with an autonomous one and pay for electric? (Will hailing an auto taxi also be cheaper per mile than an 8 year old paid off gas car?) I seem to recall that Tesla was willing to pay for electricity for their early Model S customers, but now you're on the hook for that sort of thing.
While most autonomous are electric, you don't need to have electric to have autonomous...I would suggest one not replace their 8 year old gas car with a brand new car of any type unless they were planning to do so anyway.
On the other hand, if you were in the market for a 4-5 year old car 10 years from now (to get rid of your 18 year old car that is difficult to maintain due to lack of availability of components), an electric would be cheaper overall than any gas vehicle due to total cost of ownership (no oil changes, no oil filter, no air filter, no spark plugs, no O2 sensor, no catalytic converter, no muffler, no PCV valve, no fuel filter, no gas pump, no charcoal canister or other evap emissions trap, no vacuum hoses, no ignition coils, no gasoline (far more expensive than electricity per mile), no timing belt, no water pump under high temperature demands, no inefficient mechanical a/c compressor, no large radiator with frail fins at the front of the vehicle, no coolant under extreme heat and potentially oil/combustion byproduct contamination, no head gaskets, no oil pan gasket, no clutch, no A/T fluid, 1000 fewer moving parts to fail).
If you live 20 minutes from a grocery store, in a rural area, will a 40 minute round trip actually take you 60-80 minutes with waiting times? (Also, how good is voice commands? It's pretty good at understanding "hold on, don't go anywhere, I still have more groceries to unload?")
Yeah, voice commands in most modern vehicles I've tried are atrocious. In the meantime, your electric vehicle with driver's aids will take just as long as your current vehicle. EXCEPT - you won't get stranded on an especially cold day when your gasmobile won't start or an especially hot day when your gasmobile overheats and warps the cylinder head because you didn't realize the coolant hose was cracking due to age and your coolant was leaking out little by little waiting for an especially hot day to have a total failure.
How far along are they on setting up autonomous cars for loading up large items at the store, 8 foot pieces of lumber, hooking up your trailer and loading it with firewood? Has a lot of research been done on this?
I don't understand, the human with hands and arms loads stuff like they do now. No research needed as a potential autonomous vehicle is not currently visualized to do all your individual chores for you - either it will be a large company doing deliveries per house or an individual driving to a store like normal (except not having to interface with steering nor pedals). If you have an autonomous Honda Odyssey - you'll load wood the same as a non AI version. If you have a Toyota Corolla - there is no helping you either way.
How "smart" are these cars, if you have to move it out of your driveway because someone is at your house to do some maintenance? Can you just say "go park somewhere that you're not in the way?"
When you go to the beach, do you keep your cooler, beach chairs, umbrella and any other "beach" specific things in the taxi while you sleep in the rented beach house, or do you need to keep moving that stuff into the house while you wait for the next taxi? (Sure some people don't have cars and they do without these things now, but for the large majority of people that currently own cars, how do they do things, and how would going without a car affect them?) When you go to a campsite, are you dropped off and can't keep anything in your car? When it starts pouring at 4AM, and you decided camping was a mistake, how far away is the closest robo-taxi?
I think pretty much every example is to say, while you might easily picture a world where you rely almost entirely on robo-taxis to move you around, you're probably forgetting a few billion hundred million (I'll stick to North America!) other people that live their lives differently than you. And those differences might be solved to the point that "not owning a car" is more common than owning a car at some point in the... distant future. But I think it requires some big blinders to think we're close to that point, and that we'll convert rapidly.
Yes there are all manner of one off corner cases that won't be solved for many years to come.
However, more people live in the cities than in rural areas and likely solutions (autonomous fleets) will not be designed to serve a few ten thousand scattered across a couple counties, but rather just the 1,000,000+ populations that are centralized in the urban areas (of which there are over 50 in the US alone comprising over 180,000,000 people).
Instead of thinking about how it won't cover 100% of the entire country in a near term think of the possibilities of going to a city and never having to deal with traffic or renting a car when you can just get into a transit network of mass transit + autonomous fleets. That would be a low stress vacation to me.
This really is the problem with mass transit in the USA. Many in the USA think mass transit has to serve every nook and cranny of the entire country or it is an utter failure. In fact, mass transit should serve the highest demand routes and make it easy for many others to get to a stop along that highest demand route. We shouldn't have a train every 2-3 hours but rather a high demand route that has trains every 15-20 minutes. The thinking that somebody who lives in the middle of nowhere can't get a ride so the system failed is not the right way to approach the problem in my opinion.
EDITED to ADD: I see where you are basically saying that some are predicting it is closer than it really is...and agree that is the case for 100% coverage (which will probably never happen) but 50% coverage is probably much, much closer than you realize.