Electric vehicle sales may be driven mostly by policy and preference right now, but they’ll soon be powered by dominant economics—including a profitable symbiosis between electrical drive and autonomous control, according to a former researcher for General Motors.

“What is going to happen here, I believe, is it’s just going to become easier to build an electric car,”

said Lawrence Burns, until recently the director of the Program for Sustainable Mobility at Columbia University and a professor of engineering practice at the University of Michigan. He served as General Motors’ corporate vice president of research & development and planning from 1998 to 2009. He now advises firms, including Google and Allstate, on mobility transformation.

“Beyond 2025, battery and fuel-cell vehicles could simply become the best way to design and engineer a light-duty vehicle,” Burns said tonight at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “Set aside all the motivations with climate change, oil dependence—it’s just a better way to do a car. It’s simple.”

Read more: Forbes