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Steel on steel is MUCH more efficient than rubber on asphalt. I don't know for certain, but I'm pretty sure the idea of magnetic levitation would require a great deal more energy than simple steel on steel.
Nonetheless, the future of transportation infrastructure is interesting.

True. But also much more limiting. People like to turn and go as the please. Futures that don't match the "as they please" have a habit of not happening.

Gwinnett County here just voted against joining the "subway/bus system".  It's the second most populated county in the state.  We were out that way yesterday and really had to fight traffic coming home, the wife was amazed how bad it was at 4 PM.  We rarely drive anywhere except between 10 AM and 3 PM, and then we don't go far, usually.

There were a lot of discussions about that when I lived in Marietta and they were talking about expanding MARTA up to Cobb County. There was a LOT of pushback. Generally it was based on two things:

• The number of people computing from Cobb to Atlanta was a lot lower than the number of people computing from within Cobb to their jobs within Cobb. A lot of people in Cobb didn't have any reason to go into Atlanta much.
• MARTA was seen as a way of enabling the element that people in Cobb were *trying* to keep out of Cobb of bringing them in. Cobb folks didn't want to enable that. Yes, it's blatantly racist and/or classist, but if you claim it wasn't happening I think that would be delusional.

I suspect the demographics in Gwinnett are similar enough. The people who live there do so because they want to live near Atlanta, not because they want to deal with the things they perceive as the negatives of Atlanta on a daily basis.

Gwinnett county demographics have changed a lot since the earlier votes against MARTA on racial grounds.

The racial makeup of the county was 53.3% White, 23.6% black or African American, 10.6% Asian, 0.5% American Indian, 0.1%Pacific Islander, 8.8% from other races, and 3.1% from two or more races. Those of Hispanic or Latino origin made up 20.1% of the population.

But I think too many living out there rarely come into Atlanta, so an extension of the rapid transit would not be of value to them, and it would be completed in 8 years or so.

Cobb county in the NW may vote on this next year, and Gwinnett may vote again in November, they think turnout was a factor.  The traffic here is ridiculous.

As an electrical engineer, I'm just going to say that equipping our highways with the infrastructure of inductive electric charging while driving [especially at highway speeds], and making it efficient and cost-effective enough to justify the investment, is currently too fanciful to rely on.

So, no 440V then?

People do work from home, but you wouldn't know it trying to drive anywhere around here.  The metro area adds nearly 100,000 people a year, most are going further and further out.  The city has been growing over the past 20 years or so after the usual declines.  But the metro area population is more than 10x the Atlanta city population.  Sprawl.

I wish we at least had a subway out to the baseball field, it's in a terrible traffic area, brilliant.

How would it compare with high speed rail?

The economics of HSR are usually terrible as well. In most of the US, HSR is just not a feasible mode of transport, because the country is too large and too spread out. For most of us, the car or air travel is more useful.
Consider where I live--Orange County, CA. There is a HUGE link [especially for tech workers] between the LA metro and the SF/Silicon Valley metro areas. And it's a close enough distance that it is feasible for vacationers, weekend trips, etc.
For me to fly:
25 minute drive to John Wayne Airport
About an hour parking/security/waiting for flight (it's a small enough airport that you don't need to burn 2 hrs)
An hour flying to either SJC or SFO (both are well-located)
Uber or mass transit within the city
Total transit time: About 3 hours, give or take.
Cost: ~$200 round trip if I find decent fares, not counting parking or uber. Sometimes better. Sometimes worse. That's per-person though.
Schedule: About a dozen flights each way daily.
For me to drive:
About 388 miles to downtown San Jose. 430 to downtown SF.
Transit time: Depends highly on departure time. 5 1/2 - 6 1/2 hours assuming little traffic, but getting through LA is a bitch, so that's probably closer to 7 - 7 1/2.
Cost: ~$160 r/t gas costs in the Flex. Can be amortized over up to 7 passengers in the Flex though. Realistically driving is the "low-cost" option as long as it's two or more people.
Schedule: Up to me.
HSR:
Drive or Uber to Anaheim from home (25 minutes). Assume 20 minute buffer (to ensure I'm there on time) before boarding first train. Take Metrolink from Anaheim to Los Angeles. Change trains to take HSR from Los Angeles to San Jose, all on dedicated HSR tracks, but with stops in Burbank, Palmdale, Bakersfield, Tulare, Fresno, Merced, and Gilroy. Change trains again to go from San Jose to SF on existing or upgraded CalTrans tracks. Conservatively 
assume minimum of 10 minutes at each stop on the HSR, and we'll say 20 minutes for changing trains. 
Transit time: 25 minutes driving plus 2 hrs 10 minutes for time where trains are stopped or I'm waiting for the next train. Already at almost 3 hours. Assuming transit time (aggressively) of 2 1/2 hours in between all those stops, we're already at 5 1/2 hours. That's fantasy, however, as apparently the expected maximum speed of the train is 220 mph
Cost: Really tough to identify actual cost and how much is "fare" vs how much is subsidized. I'm seeing somewhere on the order of $86 one-way fare, plus $29 from Anaheim to LA, and optional $22 more if I'm terminating in SF rather than San Jose. So we're looking at >$200 round trip, not including cost of parking or Uber. And of course that's per-passenger, so cannot be amortized across multiple passengers like a car trip. 
The economic assumptions that HSR advocates include are always INCREDIBLY rosy about ridership. So whether they can offer the number of daily trains they want, at a fare people will accept, with the knowledge that the total transit time is probably 2x air travel, is probably complete fantasy. 
This is particularly true due to the ease of the route via air. I've mentioned that there is a huge business travel component here. I've gone from Orange County to San Jose several times on the 6:45 AM flight, and come back same-day on an evening flight. Given I always target the back of the plane on Southwest, I can't tell you how many times I've been sitting in the row in the evening with the same people I was sitting in the row with on that morning flight. Same-day round trip travel is common on this routing, and for business travelers, that's completely blown up with a 6+ hour total transit time. 
For business travelers, flying is the only option. For a single person or a couple vacationing for whom transit time is more important than cost, flying is the better option. For a couple or family pinching their pennies, driving is the cheaper option with similar transit time.
Conclusion:
HSR is likely more expensive than flying while being slower. It's more expensive to MUCH more expensive than driving [depending on number of passengers] despite being similar overall transit time, even including traffic. It's not feasible for business travelers, who are the mainstay of the route, and too expensive for vacationing families with no benefit. And this LA/SF route is considered one of the "better" HSR routes economically outside of the DC/NY/Boston corridor. It fundamentally makes very little sense. 
Assuming the technical feasibility of inductive wireless charging and autonomous driving be satisfied, I don't know if the cost per mile would be higher or lower than HSR. But I think the overall economics would greatly favor the wireless charging and autonomous driving, and the users would prefer it. The freedom and scheduling makes much more sense, and if the route could be set up with cars basically becoming trains at high speed [100+ mph] and with close following distances to reduce air drag, the speed and lack of traffic jams dramatically improves the user experience of driving, as does the autonomous aspect [less fatigue/etc, safer in general]. 
So IMHO electrified autonomous driving makes a great deal of sense if we can work out the technical/cost aspects. I think the wireless inductive on-road charging may never occur, but that's NOT even critical to the advantages of autonomous driving with cars communicating with each other (increased speed / reduced air drag). It's just a nice bonus. 
And either way, HSR is silly. 

I thought this was a good question. My guesses are these:
(1) that mainly there isn't a *need* for autonomous vehicles to also be EVs, but that it helps on the social side because people who want EVs are probably much less resistant to car autonomy than people who prefer internal combustion.
(2) autonomous fill-ups (whether by gas, electric outlet or wireless recharging) seem easier without gasoline. Wireless recharging (a reachable but further-off industry dream) sounds especially seemless, which does pair the EV and AV technology better together than AVs with gasoline.
(3) Then after that, a question: Aren't ANs going to require a computer to have its thumb on all the moment by moment stats for your vehicle (and perhaps for every vehicle in your vicinity)? If so, having fewer moving parts could make EVs more amenable to the switch.

All of the above plus lower maintenance costs, which will decrease the costs of rides from whoever survives between Uber/Lyft/Waymo/etc.
As for wireless charging, I'm skeptical of that compared to the potential viability of hyperloop for intercity transportation. Long-distance electric passenger trains could be viable if batteries become dense enough. As for how autonomous cars will be charged, I suspect big parking garages will be owned by the ridesharing companies and they'll install a bunch of charging stations in the old parking spots. This would also allow them to get paid to help keep the grid balanced by varying their charging speeds, largely depending how much wind & solar generation is being produced at that point in time so that less of it will get curtailed.