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All Fossil-Fuel Vehicles Will Vanish In 8 Years, Says Stanford Study (financialpost.com)
Stanford University economist Tony Seba forecasts in his new report that petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks will no longer be sold anywhere in the world within the next eight years. As a result, the transportation market will transition and switch entirely to electrification, "leading to a collapse of oil prices and the demise of the petroleum industry as we have known it for a century," reports Financial Post. From the report: Seba's premise is that people will stop driving altogether. They will switch en masse to self-drive electric vehicles (EVs) that are ten times cheaper to run than fossil-based cars, with a near-zero marginal cost of fuel and an expected lifespan of 1 million miles. Only nostalgics will cling to the old habit of car ownership. The rest will adapt to vehicles on demand. It will become harder to find a petrol station, spares, or anybody to fix the 2,000 moving parts that bedevil the internal combustion engine. Dealers will disappear by 2024. Cities will ban human drivers once the data confirms how dangerous they can be behind a wheel. This will spread to suburbs, and then beyond. There will be a "mass stranding of existing vehicles." The value of second-hard cars will plunge. You will have to pay to dispose of your old vehicle. It is a twin "death spiral" for big oil and big autos, with ugly implications for some big companies on the London Stock Exchange unless they adapt in time. The long-term price of crude will fall to $25 a barrel. Most forms of shale and deep-water drilling will no longer be viable. Assets will be stranded. Scotland will forfeit any North Sea bonanza. Russia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Venezuela will be in trouble.
Stanford University economist Tony Seba forecasts in his new report that petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks will no longer be sold anywhere in the world within the next eight years.
Itâ(TM)s a stretch to say this for passenger autos, and maybe even busses that already run on alternative fuels. I donâ(TM)t see this in 8 to 10 years for heavy equipment and trucks. As well, there are many more things than cars, buses, trucks, planes, and heavy equipment that run on fossil fuels, oil producers will have business for a long time to come.
They will switch en masse to self-drive electric vehicles (EVs) that are ten times cheaper to run than fossil-based cars, with a near-zero marginal cost of fuel and an expected lifespan of 1 million miles. Only nostalgics will cling to the old habit of car ownership. The rest will adapt to vehicles on demand. It will become harder to find a petrol station, spares, or anybody to fix the 2,000 moving parts that bedevil the internal combustion engine. Dealers will disappear by 2024. Cities will ban human drivers once the data confirms how dangerous they can be behind a wheel. This will spread to suburbs, and then beyond. There will be a "mass stranding of existing vehicles.
This is going to happen within 8 years? It will still be a dream in 8 years, closer, but still a dream⦠Pie in the sky from egg-headed Chardonnay swilling Stanford quiche eaters.
Also from the actual article:
The long-term price of crude will fall to US$25 a barrel.
No.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
c'mon man. pay attention.
"Only nostalgics will cling to the old habit of car ownership."
But In Europe, the average age of new car buyers is already over 50, has been climbing for years.
Young people are no longer fascinated by the iron cages stuck in traffic.
These morons at Stanford haven't factored in the imminent executive order mandating coal-fired SUVs.
Nullius in verba
We live in a world where the loudest, stupidest people not only get attention, they get rewarded for it.
It isn't going to happen. I don't know what kind of bubble the authors of the survey live inside of, but there is just no way realistically that everyone that owns a car will upgrade it ten years, and that is entirely putting to one side what we would do with the other hundreds of millions of existing cars. Pure fantasy. It'll likely take many decades. The very notion is absurd.
if /. still had the kind of editors that once made it great, it would not be posting such an article uncritically.
Oh wait! He's serious?
*Explodes in unending laughter.*
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
$1000. What kind of odds are you offering. Loser pays to winners favorite 501-c3 charity.
>"Cities will ban human drivers once the data confirms how dangerous they can be behind a wheel. This will spread to suburbs, and then beyond"
And those of us who ENJOY driving, especially motorcycles (which can likely never be self-driving) are royally screwed. But hey, I suppose a super-safe and boring life is so much more meaningful than a a free and enjoyable one with some risk....
Oh, make sure to ban bicycles and pedestrians too. Then start banning skateboards, roller skates/blades, horseback riding, skydiving, mounting climbing, target shooting, football, skiing, dogs, game consoles, whatever. Life is just not safe, you know.
I've been waiting to see this since 1973.
I've seen this before. It's a variant of pump and dump... Except there is no dump.
When I see these, there is a presumption that the populace will simply abandon billions they have invested, collectively, in rolling stock.
Not gonna happen
I'll take that bet. No way in hell all fossil fuel cars are done by then.
What Slashdot needs is a feature where articles that make predictions like this, can be saved off in some special place. Then, when the date for these predictions comes due, we can all reflect back on how truly inspired these predictions were. Or more likely, laugh at them. Something similar to the "This day on Slashdot" section on the right hand side of the main page.
all cars will have holes in the sides.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
Diesel/Petrol/Gas vehicles won't be sold anywhere? Not a snowball's chance in hell - global warming pun intended.
Think of the challenges in various Asian and African countries. China too. The abundance of "sunlight" for batteries is not going to influence EV, ala Giga Factory. And charging EV's with electricity from fossil-fuel burning power plants is just plain ridiculous and will happen for many years. Try again after 10 years with a new estimate.
Stanford - that explains much. Ivory tower scientist in pure form.
Even if such magical event happened, there will be plenty of places in the world where "slightly used" 10 year old pickup or truck will be welcomed as an upgrade to 20 year old vehicle.
There is always option to switch to methanol, or vegetable oil ... and make better life.
I will take any day used Ford F150 , M35A2 (yes, that is nice multi fuel engine).
Prius? i will not touch with long stick. no infrastructure here.
By 2030, within 10 years of regulatory approval of autonomous vehicles (AVs), 95% of U.S. passenger miles traveled will be served by on-demand autonomous electric vehicles owned by fleets, not individuals, in a new business model we call “transportas-a-service” (TaaS).
Okay, well now we know it probably ain't happening by 2030...
Who cares about the London stock exchange? Article is like a doctor who episode where the whole world revolves around the UK.
Will there even be enough charging stations for people to travel all lengths of highway in North America with EVs? Assuming they're willing to stop that long to charge every 400 miles. Do we think this will be a solved problem for semi-trailers in that time?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
We're in petrol for a looooong time to come, folks.
No offense, egghead, but it's going to take a bit longer than 8 years. You see, the automobile transportation industry operates a little bit differently than your dot-com technology companies and their incessantly changing APIs. Infrastructure and building real things take time. Where are all these electric vehicles going to CHARGE?
No, it'll be at LEAST 2 decades before the fleet reaches 50% electrification. You're just plain wrong. Maybe spend some time outside of the Bay Area? Things are nice there, but it's hardly the REAL WORLD.
Maybe a few first world countries will get to 50% electric vehicles in 10 years. Average car age is ~10 years, refinereries won't close up shop if oil prices plummet, and without an outright ban people will choose to keep driving existing cars until gasoline prices are higher per year than payments on an electric car
I'm as open to alternative forms of transportation as you can be, but that is just hilarious.
G'on, tell me another one
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I'll bet EVERYONE. Put up your money, make me rich. Stanford, the new standard for idiot.
Should we call it a "Standford cap" instead of a "dunce cap"?
if you're driving a fossil fuel car, be careful not to run over any pieces of the sky that's falling. They are sharp and may cause flats.
So if this guy's prediction more or less holds in 2037, and someone finds this old /. using Amazon Search (haha, my prediction) he was WRONG. Not even close.
Stanford University economist Tony Seba forecasts in his new report that petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks will no longer be sold anywhere in the world within the next eight years.
...and I thought Stanford was, like, where smart people go? I mean, I'm all for EV's and all, but nothing short of an invasion of space aliens or global thermonuclear war is gonna sink fossil fuels in 8 years. Did he stick that in a footnote somewhere?
Hell, I'd like to see what other fascinating reports Mr. Seba has published, like when when the giraffe's are going to eat our brains, or that all people will walk around around without pants by 2021, devastating the Levi Strauss Company.
I would also like to experience the "inspiration" for this fascinating report. I expect it's green and sticky and comes from a "dispensary" in return for a "prescription" you get from a "doctor" for your "anxiety".
I love California, I really do.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
"Only nostalgics will cling to the old habit of car ownership."
But In Europe, the average age of new car buyers is already over 50, has been climbing for years.
Young people are no longer fascinated by the iron cages stuck in traffic.
Yong people or even middle age people don't buy new cars, I don't what you do in USA but almost everyone buys second hand cars here - it's just too expensive to buy new.
My car will be fine in 8 years. Not only that, it will be paid off (it's paid off now, I paid cash for it). Maybe in 20 years, but most insurance guys give me a better than 50/50 chance of being dead by then so it won't matter to me.
cops and firefighters. When they are forced to use all-electric police cars and fire trucks, I will believe it.
Typically these two institutions get a pass on everything, like whenever California passes a new gun law banning this or that, cops get a free pass and they can still carry whatever they want.
Not going to happen in the USA, no way, no how. This "researcher" is an idiot.
There is too much oil out there, especially in North America. Then, once we get though all that, there is a couple million boat loads of Natural Gas what will make a great motor fuel. It's going to take more than 8 years to burn all that, or make it economically viable to do anything else. Until it's cheaper to do something else, it's not going to happen. Surely they teach this stuff at Stanford... Right?
Oh, you think electricity will be cheaper???? So, until Fusion becomes the thing, I don't see how that happens... There isn't that much sunshine or places to build windmills..
I don't know what these people are smoking, but it's got to be some good stuff growing over there at Stanford's economics department...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Dream on!
Good lord, people. The guy is a "lecturer" in Stanford's continuing studies program. He's an adjunct in a nobody program. This paper is an embarrassment.
Protip - when identifying someone as an "economist" at a university they should be a researcher in the economics department. Duh.......
Not totally out to lunch, but his timeline is too short and his prediction of the extent to which we'll shift to automation is too extreme. Most cars sold today are still ICE, and the time that people keep a vehicle on the road has gotten longer. People expect to drive these vehicles 10 years. He's discounting the political will of people 10 years from now who don't want their vehicles legislated off the road. These people will be disproportionately low-income, because they tend to drive older vehicles. Manual control won't totally disappear. Often neglected in these predictions are motorcycle riders. Even if a self-driving bike is built, there's no point in that. The "rolling thunder" crowd tends to be older, and there are a lot of vets in it. These people VOTE. They'll have something to say about it. His predictions are *technically* possible, but not politically possible.
Self-driving will have to coexist with manual driving, and the insurance companies will have something to say about it. There might even be an effect where poor drivers are encouraged or mandated to chose self-driving vehicles, such as drunk drivers. Manual control might become the domain of the more expert drivers with excellent records who garner lower insurance rates, or wealthy and/or enthusiasts who are willing to pay higher rates; but it's not likely to go away.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
In other news, study proves that city boy in Stanford has never lived any place where people are poor and/or rural.
They're making this prediction so they can have something to be furious about in eight years when it doesn't happen, blaming the right or the patriarchy or whatever for preventing it.
They're already furious about plenty of things, but I guess they want to stock up just in case.
Maybe he meant all electric vehicles will vanish in 8 years..?
Gas stations are very low margin businesses. In fact, they pretty much only make money on store items; not gas. EV owners don't go to gas stations, so as more EV owners avoid the gas station, more gas stations go out of business. As more gas stations go out of business, it becomes increasingly inconvenient to have a gas-powered car improving the value of an EV. This is just one vicious cycle on top of the already compelling economics of EVs.
This is going to happen so much faster than we think.
To generate near enough power for all that you will need an abundant amount of dynamic power, which means internal combustion engine generators...massive farms of them. Like server farms, but for making power. The byproduct exhaust will be used to spin turbines to make even more power. The residual exhaust will then be pumped in to giant underwater air bags which will rise to the top of the water and will pull cords which will spin even more generators. The heated bags will then release the gases into a giant tented structure where it's treated and released back into the atmosphere.
As a Nissan Leaf owner, I call bullshit on this prediction.
"leading to a collapse of oil prices and the demise of the petroleum industry as we have known it for a century,
As long as we make plastic and pharmaceuticals, there will still be a steady demand for oil. The oil may even last longer.
Obviously true, since everyone will feed their old gas guzzler into their Mr. Matter Transmogrifier and convert it into a flying humanoid robot that will carry them from destination to destination.
Sorry, I drive a 47 year old car and will keep driving it till it breaks. . . then I will fix it and keep driving it until I wreck it. . . then I will fix it and keep driving it until I am no longer capable. . . then I will be dead. . . then my kids have a turn at it.
All this I will do because: A. I like my car, B. Shut up and get off my lawn Standford!
P.S. I guess they have never thought what slobs people are and how disgusting a shared car will be, the thought makes me cringe.
A car contains more than a ton of steel. Even if personally owned cars are all banned, people will still pay your for them just for the scrap metal they contain.
I live in BFE upstate new york. I can’t go anywhere without a car. We are lucky enough to have the only Target within 60 miles, and we have to drive over 100 miles to get to any kind of decent mall. A friend of mine lives in Montana, which is a huge state that has a whopping million people. There are other states out there that have even lower total populations or population per square mile.
People who live in big cities like LA or NYC or many places in Europe are spoiled by the fact that they have good public transport and a large part of the population doesn’t HAVE to own a car.
Now, this article is ostensible about petrolium-fueled cars being replaced by electric ones. Well, when you can drive 2000 miles on a single charge, and recharge within maybe 30 minutes (try to imagine how much current you’d have to draw for that!), then maybe this kind of transition will happen. But there will still be a large spread out population that gets royally screwed by this, and there are enough western states in the US that will face this problem that their votes and voices in Congress will create some serious challenges to legislation in this area.
showing they are not doing intelligent research. attendance falls by 90%
jesus christ, get some fucking brains and think critically for just 2 god damned seconds people. Stanford, your study is flawed starting with the first words. End of study.
This might happen in some small 1st world county, but not in the majority of the world and not even in a single city in the US. Try 20 years dumbasses and even then still won't happen in the trucking/train world for another 30+ unless Elon makes some huge advancements and GIVES away that tech to the truck and train manufacturers.
It's pretty obvious that the whole study is flaw since it uses the word "Vehicle" for the hypothesis, which includes all vehicles, land, sea, and air... Thus far, there's very little exploration into electric air vehicles and none in all-electric boats.
Which does make a fair amount of sense, on the boat stance. Not very many still-living people that stand in a large body of water and say "Know what I need right now? a 40Kw battery strapped under my feet!!"
People still need to get from A to B, and conveniently.
1. Work
2. School
3. Shopping.
Try to do all of those purely with Uber or ZipCar. It's not easy. I know of one family that make it work, but they are the exception, far from the norm. They live in the city within blocks of the kids' school and the MBTA where the ZipCar pickup is, and crucially, Dad's office is on the red line too. They ZipCar the big grocery runs once a week. There is no way that I could sanely commute to my employment by public transportation or Uber, I have a 20 mile commute, live 25 minutes walk from the commuter rail and would have 3 miles at the other end to contend with.
So people will still need cars, and maybe they'll all be electric. Well I have news for him there too. Take the VW eGolf as an example, it has a 24kWh battery capable of "Up to" 83 miles. My commute alone would be 12kWh a day minimum. That electricity has to come from somewhere. Let's say it comes from my average 6KW solar array that in New England cities will probably average 3kWh/kW generation per day. Great! I average 18kWh of generation a day, enough to handle my commute. The thing is, my wife need to drive too, and in the opposite direction. My neighbors on one side have 2 cars too, and on the other side is a 3-family with 5 cars between them, but still only one roof.
So residential solar isn't going to cover residential vehicles' electricity requirements. Sure, it will help, as will commercial solar, but the idea that a world without gas cars will crush oil prices within 8 years is ludicrous. 80, perhaps. I'd even accept 30 as a possibility.
He forgets OPEC and all the other vested interests that will work hard to slow down the transition.
... "leading to a collapse of oil prices and the demise of the petroleum industry as we have known it for a century," ...
As "Slater" said on Archer, Season 6, Episode 8, "The Kanes":
'Cause if you think the Middle East is messed up now, just wait until nobody needs their oil.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Big oil will have Trump in their pocket for the next four years. So, it won't even get a good start until after that. Four years (after Trump) isn't going to be enough time to make it happen. Will we be on our way to a transition? Yeah... probably a little more than we are now. I'm not sure what the lead time on a new vehicle is... but I don't see Detroit bringing out all electric now. Someone doesn't understand lead time.
1. Really good batteries and quick charge stations. (Yes. But I wouldn't say they are everywhere yet or mass producible for that matter.) 2. Get the public to buy all electric. (Some will. Some are now. But it's not going to be a quick transition. People change quickly. Society doesn't.) 3. Keep Big Oil from throwing a wrench in the works. (Fat chance.) 4. 20+ years away. (Probably.)
I see the words "university" and "economist" in the same sentence, and it automatically encourages me to invest in more energy shares.
My timeline is more realistic. I've just bought a new (petrol) car. In ten years, I will trade it in for an electric one. Ten years after that, I plan to trade it for an electric self-driving car.
So my predictions are:
2026 Most cars will be electric.
2036 Most cars will be electric and self-driving.
or just plain Austerity driving those numbers? I don't think the working class ever recovered from the 2008 economic crash.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I have to drive this car into the ground, because I can't afford another one. Unless someone is replacing my engine, transmission, brakes, and tires for free, I doubt this will be reality.
A brilliant red Barchetta, from a better, vanished time. Fire up the willing engine, responding with a roar! Tires spitting gravel, I commit my weekly crime
Short story the song was based on...The story, "A Nice Morning Drive," by Richard S. Foster, first appeared in the November 1973 issue of Road and Track.
http://oppositelock.kinja.com/...
A dozen years ago things had begun changing. First there were a few modest safety and emission improvements required on new cars; gradually these became more comprehensive. The governmental requirements reached an adequate level, but they didn't stop; they continued and became more and more stringent. Now there were very few of the older models left, through natural deterioration and... other reasons.
The safety crusade had been well done at first. The few harebrained schemes were quickly ruled out and a sense of rationality developed. But in the late Seventies, with no major wars, cancer cured and social welfare straightened out. the politicians needed a new cause and once again they turned toward the automobile. The regulations concerning safety became tougher. Cars became larger, heavier, less efficient. They consumed gasoline so voraciously that the United States had had to become a major ally with the Arabian countries. The new cars were hard to stop or maneuver quickly. but they would save your life (usually) in a 50-mph crash. With 200 million cars on the road, however, few people ever drove that fast anymore.
Despite the extent of the safety program, it was essentially a good idea. But unforeseen complications had arisen. People became accustomed to cars which went undamaged in 10-mph collisions. They gave even less thought than before to the possibility of being injured in a crash. As a result, they tended to worry less about clearances and rights-of-way, so that the accident rate went up a steady six percent every year. But the damages and injuries actually decreased, so the government was happy, the insurance industry was happy and most of the car owners were happy. Most of the car owners, the owners of the non-MSV cars, were kept busy dodging the less careful MSV drivers, and the result of this mismatch left very few of the older cars in existence. If they weren't crushed between two 6000-pound sleds on the highway they were quietly priced into the junkyard by the insurance peddlers. And worst of all, they became targets...
It hadn't taken long for the less responsible element among drivers to discover that their new MSVs could inflict great damage on an older car and go unscathed themselves. As a result some drivers would go looking for the older cars in secluded areas, bounce them off the road or into a bridge abutment, and then speed off undamaged, relieved of whatever frustrations caused this kind of behavior. Police seldom patrolled these out-of-the-way places, their attentions being required more urgently elsewhere, and so it became a great sport for some drivers.
There will be a "mass stranding of existing vehicles." The value of second-hard cars will plunge. You will have to pay to dispose of your old vehicle. It is a twin "death spiral" for big oil and big autos, ...
Damn you Obamacare. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Cant you see that we are now in the era of the organised mafia government mandating what happens and when. This guy is just letting you know what the mafia government have on their radar and when. give the guy a break and shut up. Its gonna happen whether you want it or not. dufus people.
God is going to come down from Heaven and take away all the fuel-burning cars.
What in hell is this guy smoking? If people do switch to electric cars, that cost of providing electricity is not going to be near zero. There is not enough installed capacity to handle EVs replacing all cars, and solar is not going to cut it for much of the country especially in winter months.
Hey I am more than happy to keep building power plants for you, as that is my career choice. It will keep me employed until I retire.
Also, a million miles expected lifespan is not achievable with the design life of mechanical parts in automobiles at all.
I live at the end of a twisty gravel road that runs between trees and fields. Can't see my neighbours. No passing traffic. No one else goes where I go, so ride sharing and public transport just don't work. Sure hope this one size fits all theorizing don't screw anybody who doesn't fit their pattern.
"The first Matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime; a triumph equaled only by its monumental failure." The Architect to Neo
[($)]
Oooops, sorry. Wrong forum.
Are you saying that we should make slashdot great again?
Once we have true self-driving vehicles, I plan to buy a van and fully live out of it. Vehicles are far cheaper than housing. Park and charge during work hours, mini-hot plate for cooking, bathroom at the nearest public business, and showers at a work or a gym. The van can be scheduled to randomly drive itself between different packing lots throughout the night. If I really need a place to call my own, there's still plenty of super cheap land available in the middle of nowhere, easy to get there while sleeping in the van.
Tie it in with on-demand/dynamic/drone delivery and you'll be able to order whatever and have your car drive to meet the drop off location and have the produce automatically inserted into the car's package receptacle. All that can happen while you're sleeping in it. The majority of your daily errands will become automated. Expect little pizza delivery vehicles and order yourself up an Amazon home package carrier robot with which you can deposit your packages to mail (Amazon will probably patent it before the other shippers do).
I wonder how many people will invest a home oven startup. Instead of requiring a large oven in your kitchen, you place a rental order and one drives to you to cook that large Thanksgiving dinner. When you're food is done, it drive off to the next house or to recharge. Many, many things could be turned into services when delivery becomes automated.
Everyone seems to keep missing that self-driving cars will cause a MAJOR disruption to our current style of living. Truckers losing their jobs is the least of it. A large portion of the next generation will skip out on buying homes and skip out on renting (the last so called safe investment). People are already doing it, though they're doing it out of financial pressure rather than as a lifestyle. Recall an earlier article about the roving bands of poor Uber drivers who camp out at convenience store parking lots during the night.
Do you think we will see level-5 self-driving gasoline cars? The automation is what will drive the trend, not specifically the electric portion.
I am all for electric cars, and I hope and expect that they will take over for many uses.
However, there is no death spiral, but quite the opposite. Once half the cars are electric, this will cause a major reduction in the price of motor fuels. This will motivate owners of traditional cars to keep them in use.
Likewise, electricity is not free, and batteries do not last forever, and have a big amortization cost. The marginal cost of electric cars is nowhere near zero.
I think all of Seba's predictions could come to pass, but it's going to take more like a generation, rather than 8 years. First of all, road-ready self drive vehicles will have to be able to coexist with human drivers until the "manual drivers" are all off the road. This is a much harder problem than operating in an all self drive world.
It will also take time to build out the electric vehicle infrastructure and retire the massive gasoline/diesel distribution network. There will be a transitional period in which self drive cars are hybrids, rather than pure electrics.
Finally, a world of self drive will be a world in which cars will be much more up-front expensive than today, and therefore will be all owned by fleets and operated like Uber or Lyft. This will lead to replacing all that parking at places where people live, work, eat and shop with warehouse storage at places where it proves easiest to stage vehicles to end users. This will free up all that end-user parking for more construction in place of the old parking lots. Just by itself, resculpturing urban areas will take longer than 8 years.
I don't see facts in the article to support the claim. The statement that most of the "wishful modeling" relies upon is this:
The “tipping point” will arrive over the next two to three years as EV battery ranges surpass 200 miles and electric car prices in the US drop to $30,000. By 2022 the low-end models will be down to $20,000. After that, the avalanche will sweep all before it.
What percentage of Americans (much less Chinese or Indians) can afford a $30000 car?
What kind of car can people buy if they can afford only $10k-$15k?
It's currently cheaper to run my plug-in hybrid on gasoline than on electricity. I only use electricity for convenience and smugness.
In places like Europe, China or India, they might have social government policies that might shift people toward electric infrastructure, but in Amurica [sic], the electoral majority has put in charge the people who want to keep gas prices low and reduce restrictions on auto makers for at least another 3 years. Good luck with that "tipping point".
Well, fucking duh. The primary cost of a taxi/uber is the driver. Once you don't have to pay them the cost of just calling a car to you, and using it only when you need it, is a tiny fraction of the cost of buying and owning your own car. Look outside, right now. What do you see? Odds are, cars. Parked cars, just sitting there, being used by no one. There's no logical way you can look at that and think to yourself "this is cost effective, this is efficient". So you'll have to think of some illogical way that the world will remain static forever, you know, like how there's no way these stupid "smart" phone things will ever take over, people will still primarily use a big computer because, they want a big screen right?
And the disappearance of gas is even more transparent. Electricity is source agnostic, has a distribution grid larger than anything else imaginable, and currently costs, as the article states, about a tenth per mile travelled that gas does. Unless oil is about to get down to $5 a barrel you can kiss it goodbye in terms of gas. Oh and electric engines are cheaper to build, easier to maintain, and last longer than gas ones. But don't argue with me, argue with every major car company on the planet. They're all spending hundreds of millions to build electric cars over the next 8 years, save Toyota, who's pumping hundreds of millions into hydrogen instead cause "everyone else is wrong" but not in the way you want to argue.
The article just states the same thing engineers and researchers realized years ago, it's hardly surprising. That is unless you're someone on slashdot standing atop stupid hill yelling about how you know so much more about the industry than everyone on the planet that actually runs it.
Not arguing about the time frame - seems optimistic to me - but:
Many of these vehicles will be able to adequately charge at home, at night, when the grid is considerably unloaded as compared to the day - it's a perfectly reasonable scenario. Most of us rest at night. Most of those vehicles won't be going on long trips on any given day, and so most of them won't even need that much of a charge. You'll see charging stations where you're used to seeing parking meters in cities and towns, too.
The idea that there's insufficient infrastructure to handle a fleet composed of mostly electric vehicles is almost entirely wrong. And for the high-charge, long-haul requirements, those waystations can be built the same way: pick up energy at night, hand it out 24/7. Most of this is just engineering.
The real problem right now is batteries, or energy storage in the car. Expensive, short-lived, toxic, heavy, and simply not enough of them. When and if that's solved, EVs will come into their own. Not before. Right now they are a wealthy person's toy. 30 grand for what amounts to a VW bug, only with less Hitler.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I don't know about you, but I have absolutely no interest in having to load and unload everything I keep in my car for taking care of kids every time I go somewhere. Spare diapers, wipes, stroller, car seats, entertainment. Then there's those times you have a busy day and have to feed the kids in the car. Every time I make a stop I now have to clean the car top to bottom or get some kind of fine because my kids left some fries in the back seat?
For the foreseeable future, people with young kids are going to be using private vehicles. Shared vehicles with kids is simply impractical.
link to actual report mentioned in news article: "Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030 The Disruption of Transportation and the Collapse of the Internal-Combustion Vehicle and Oil Industries"
https://static1.squarespace.co...
I'd like some of what he is smoking please!
This article is obviously ridiculous. But, just to flog a dead horse, even when everything else is electrified, jets are still going to run on jet fuel for a long, long time.
There is not enough battery production capacity, let alone vehicles. Also this is a chicken and egg problem. Battery makers are unlikely to commit 100 billion needed to produce batteries to meet need for all vehicles before there are vehicles and vice versa. I think it will take 3-5 generation of vehicle making, each spanning 3-5 years. So we are looking close to 15-25 years, not 8 years.
My plan thus far.
1. Believe crazy man's story
2. Sell car now to prepare for obvious and unavoidable future
3. Purge all stocks from companies with business model based on fossil fuel
4. Buy as much Tesla stock as possible
5. Sit back and wait for the profits to start streaming in
2 choices. Tenure if he's right. Sacked if wrong.
I'm betting on him being sacked.
Alaska won't change. A working vehicle with a working heater will save your life. Northern states and Canada won't change. Need heaters in their vehicles to stay alive in winter.
Places without solid power won't change. There are lots of places in the world that don't have access to electrical power all the time.
Only snooty assholes think everyone else in the world will behave like they do around SF/N-Cali. Idiots.
This is pure click bait... Reminds me of "Premise Beach" skits from The Kids in the Hall. If these people are being serious, that must be one hell of an echo chamber.
Fifty years? Okay.
Twenty years? Very unlikely, though not totally outside the realm of possibility.
Eight years? You're dreaming. Fossil fuels WILL start feeling the pain by then, but they're sure as hell going to stick around for the next decade at a bare minimum.
Or Solar.
You are clearly being stupid. In 8 years, we will all share ubers that are self-driving boats. There are two SF startups that were just created for this very purpose just as I typed this. You just don't understand how the Technologies!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I would be willing to wager with this person that this prediction is incorrect.
They will arrest, torture and outright murder people to stop it
What kind of gas-guzzler do you have that gets 2000 miles on a tank?!
A bit to fantastic. It will eventually happen especially is governments world wide push it. As for the price of oil and the oil companies it doesn't take much to crash oil price and bankrupt the oil companies. Just a 10% decrease in the oil market would do it coupled with an accelerating reduction in all gasoline cars. If I would have to guess I would say more like 30 years for a 90% penetration for cars. Trucks will take 50 years.
All EV will require a huge boost in electricity production. How will we do it? Since the easiest and fastest way to increase capacity is to burn coal, oil or gas, perhaps oil will not vanish that fast.
Scotland will forfeit any North Sea bonanza. Russia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Venezuela will be in trouble.
Russia has a more diversified economy than the others and may be able to handle the change. Venezuela is already in trouble.
No the professor didn't claim that all Fossil Fuel vehicles will vanish in 8 years, some moron journalist fucked it up and misinterpreted it and then the submitter exaggerated it. The professor is likely responsible for the intelligent parts of the story like all new car sales will be electric in 8 years. He likely has the numbers to back it up. Also the price of oil will collapse and it will strand the assets of oil extraction companies, but not in 8 years. It will take a bit longer since most cars last 9 years (at least here in Ontario, Canada where we have winter and salt that destroys cars). The journalist then probably added the "pay for disposal of cars" since he is to poor to own a car and doesn't know they are made of metal. The submitter pulled the title out of his ass.
There is no way electric battery can fairly compete with gas. Yes, a government can force people to ride self driving cars, horse buggy, treadmills, whatever . But that would have nothing to do with efficiency and costs and convenience of the user, but rather everything to do with politics and limiting users freedom. Right now anyone can Own a car and drive to anywhere. It is intolerable. We want to tell you where to go. We want you to be the user not the owner.
I don't disagree that what he says may come to pass, but I was thinking there was a typo and it was supposed to be 80 years, not 8. I could see much if not all of them coming to pass over the next 80 years, but to think that there is going to be a massive shift in the next 8, I don't plan on even replacing my car in the next 8 years.
I could see possibly hybrid + electric maybe reaching 50% of new car sales in 8 years. EV realistically in the 5-10% range (for the US). A place like Norway which is already approaching 25% adoption could be getting to 80% but Norway has by far the largest percentage of new cars being EVs already and still with the EV market share growing. The US EV market share has been fairly stagnate in the 1-2% range.
Why the hell would you post this "story"?
Sounds like a plan!
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Universities teach useless knowledge.
maybe we shouldn't have legalized pot in california. It seems to make Stanford people go whacky
We'll be using flying pigs for transport!
Why do people say this? ICEV's can be automated just fine. The one real difference that made that not true (hydraulic steering assist) is now gone.
The fact is EV's have all sorts of benefits that have nothing at all to do with automation, and that's why they will take over.
In many places, electricity IS cheaper (than gasoline/diesel). Even solar electricity is cheaper, and it's getting cheaper every month.
I'm willing to bet ten million dollars that they won't vanish.
...living in the utopia bubble.
These analysts sometimes needs to wake the fuck up and look past their fancy apartment windows or their well groomed and trimmed lawns.
Let me guess his other guesses... does he also think that in 10 or 20 years time no one will drive cars anymore, they'll be all automated and interconnected and some such bullshit? Yeah... that's not all that different from drawings of the 60s imagining the future of the year 2000 or, you know, Jetsons. More current comparison, it's the same shit as Solar FREAKIN' Roadways.
We have huge portions of the world that are still using horses as means of transportation, firewood heated ovens, and whatnot - not by choice, but because technology never reached them. It's not like struggling economies will easibly be able to switch from one fuel category to another magically as if that required zero effort, time and money.
And if we're talking about fuel which some entire countries economies are heavily dependant on, it's more likely that whatever is left of humanity after multiple wars that happens due to oil dependancy fallout, we'll actually all be back on horses or on foot, those who are left.
Can you even imagine all the countries that are heavily dependant on oil suffering an economic fallout and ending up like the current war torn refugee producing countries that we have right now? It'd be catastrophic.
I support going green as much as anyone else who's worried about how much pollution is going into the ecosystem plus climate change, but realistically speaking, don't think the fossil fuel industry will take drastic changes without a fight. Our dependancy got to the point of entire economies supporting some extremely horrible stuff in exchange for oil, and the consequences of that will echo for centuries.
Dang, we're not even close to a road to being ready for the energy scalability problem.
I dunno if people or this guy realizes this, but electric cars right now don't account for even 1% of new car sales in even the most modern countries. It's a fraction of a percentage, which is a start, but it can basically be seen as novelty.
Once sales starts ramping up, then things start getting exponentially complicated. The energy you use to charge cars with has to come from somewhere, and the national electric grid for most countries are not prepared to replace oil in even minor scales... most of them already have their hands full with how things are progressing now with oil based vehicles being prevalent, they can't be expected to upgrade in any short to mid timeframe.
We already need more than a decade for battery technology and other technological barriers to progress and get implemented.
We will need slow and steady growth to avoid multiple types of problems. If we even get there, that is.
The idea of the majority of people switching to public transportation is great on paper, but it's been around since ancient times, and there are multiple obstacles that each can take decades of development to overcome for most countries in the world, and there needs to be focus on those alone for it to happen. Stuff like public security, optimization of city infrastructures, cultural shifts, welfare and work relatioship reforms... I'm talking the tip of the iceberg only here.
You can look at this on another way. Mass production of cars came around a century ago, and an exponential number of paradigms were created on top of it. Cities were built and grew around the idea, cultures were formed on top of it, how we work, get entertainment, do everyday stuff, how security works, and a whooole bunch of other things were built assuming we have access to cars. It's an unfanthomable ammoung of things to unwrap. So it's no surprise how paradigms like those are not simple to change.
Short of an alien race coming down to Earth, enslaving all of us, killing half of Earth's population and then mandating everything we do essencially changing life how we know it, the fossil fueled vehicles paradigm will not vanish or fundamentally change in 8 years. Oh, and you know what also won't happen in 8 years... or ever? That Hyperloop crap. Mark my words.
Electric cars are not feasible yet. There is a lack of charging stations in my neck of the woods -- southwestern Arizona, Northern Baja California and Norther Sonora. And the cars can't go 500 miles on a charge... (Ensenada to Phoenix, for example). So I won't be buying one until battery technology improves to where they can power a vehicle for 500 miles, and can charge fully in 15 minutes, and are good for at least 4000 charge cycles....
Before we jump to the self driving cars how about delivering on the damn flying cars that were only a decade away all the way back to the 60s? One pipe dream at a time.
"All Fossil-Fuel Vehicles Will Vanish In 8 Years, Says Stanford Study" ... "will no longer be sold anywhere in the world within the next eight years"
These statements are not the same thing. Even if the second one were true and all sales of fossil-fuel vehicles stopped in eight years there would still be tens of millions of those types of vehicles around for many decades. One of my farm trucks is a 1986/1968 (body is the newer year, engine and transmission is the older year) and it's still going strong. It does it's job. With nominal maintenance it will last 50 to 100 years more.
The new non-fossil-fuel vehicles are going to initially cost a lot more than a used fossil-fuel vehicle so a lot of people are not going to be able to afford the new vehicles for another decade beyond, more more, even if the new ones are cheaper to run.
"people will stop driving altogether"
Another faulty assumption and highly urban centric. A lot of us live out in the rural areas where there is no public transportation, no Uber, no other form of transport other than our personal vehicles.
More over, many people, especially businesses and very especially small business such as our farm, have specialized vehicles such as our delivery van, livestock hauling, farm trucks, etc. We're not going to stop driving these any decade soon.
The biggest problem with this ivory tower thinker is he lives so high up in the urban stratosphere that he can't see the nitty gritty reality.
I look forward to self-driving electric vehicles but they're not going to be here for a long time and certainly are not going to replace all fossil-fuel vehicles for decades beyond that.
Wrong. Sorry. There are cars on lots RIGHT now, selling just like they've been, by and large, for decades. The VAST majority are gasoline or diesel powered. Next year, as a year's worth of cars are destroyed in fires, natural disasters, motor vehicle collisions, due to theft, mechanical failure, or are simply traded in for newer, fancier, prettier cars and trucks, the situation will be mostly the same as it is now. The electrical infrastructure will be NOWHERE NEAR as advanced nor will it have proliferated anything LIKE as far as it would need to have done for purely electrical vehicles to have a snowball's chance in HELL of gaining any real traction versus the MILLIONS and MILLIONS of gasoline-powered vehicles ALREADY on the road.
The only way you can get electric cars to replace gasoline would be if there were a sufficient increase in capabilities, and simultaneously a decrease in price, neither of which is likely, or if people start being willing to drive cars that are VERY different from today's, like the Solar Racer or whatever, where the car is a teardrop, cut in half, with three wheels attached, covered in solar panels, and a set of bike tires to carry it, which would require ALL the existing cars, AND all other vehicles such as semi-tractor trailers, (which have moved, probably several times, just about every single thing you own at one point or another before it got to you,) and construction vehicles and emergency vehicles, etc., to be mandated OFF roads since that's the ONLY way such a small, light, un-crashworthy car like a little solar powered toy could be operated SAFELY, is if there's nothing bigger, or more massive than IT to run into.
Honestly, if what they're talking about were even POSSIBLE, it would have happened already because there are probably MILLIONS of zero emissions vehicles in America and many other countries as well, which people COULD use for some, many, or even MOST trips they take INSTEAD of cars, but they DON'T use them despite their being environmentally friendlier, lighter, less expensive, better for the person using them AND the rest of the world at large, but people DON'T. (They're called BICYCLES.) I ride mine when I can; can YOU say the same?
The ONLY way this 'report' or 'study' or whatever, could POSSIBLY be right is if an asteroid strike, nuclear war, famine, etc., destroys virtually every human being, and the few that survive HAPPEN to have electric cars already, AND the means to charge them without any infrastructural support. None of this seems especially likely, nor a scenario worth worrying about as most of us would die in any of these scenarios. (We live in a magical time and place that has never before been, will probably never again be, and which is likely to end very soon. Like the 60's.)
So when people say shit like this, I just laugh and think, "gosh, it's a good thing these people aren't running shit but their mouths."
On the other hand, we have incompetent morons, sycophants, rampant corruption at all levels of most governments, so it probably wouldn't be any worse if they WERE running shit.
It's going to take more than fuel savings to phase out the fossil fuel car, otherwise it would have happened already. Fortunately, a fleet of self-driving on-demand robo-cars offers a number of additional cost savings:
1. Insurance. The cost may never fully go away, but automated driving software should start to outperform humans in a few years.
2. Parking. Robo cars never have to pay for overpriced urban parking. They can be parked and recharged in the outer suburbs, or in some cases, out of state. They can drive around while waiting to be summoned by a passenger.
3. Property tax. The robo cars will be registered in a state that does not charge property tax on motor vehicles.
4. Driver. You get the benefit of a chauffeur without paying a human to do the work.
Bear in mind, there are many special interests that make a lot of money from the status quo. For one thing, government is heavily invested in mass transit, traffic cams, speeding tickets, etc. Traditional cabs and private cars might be the first things to go, but nobody is going to bother with a bus or train when it's easier to summon a robo car and have it take you directly to your destination.
Their survey/prediction is a bit optimistic, but something like this will probably happen here eventually.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
he's fighting economics.
He's saying the oil price AND demand will drop. One maybe, but both is unlikely unless something much more interesting disaster happens.
His theory may be a story the makes green friends happy, but it seems unlikely that electrics or lack of desire to go anywhere will drive both down. Saying it will happen in a mere 8 years seems short sighted on his part. Usually such a prediction is further out, like after the predictor is long gone.
Heading to Canada to hide the red barchetta :-)
1) People drive motorcycles for fun, not for any other reason.
2) People buy muscle cars for fun, not for any other reason.
3) The same people that buy sports/ cars and motorcycles will continue to buy them and prevent the legal changes this idiot thinks will happen.
Cities, yes, they may outlaw human driven vehicles. But not suburban and rural areas. And states like TEXAS may use state laws to prevent cities from outlawing human driven vehicles.
But more importantly, while robot cars are more likely to be electric, that is not a requirement. Don't confuse the two. There will be human driven electric cars like the Tesla sports car, and there will be robot driven gasoline powered cars.
Cops will almost certainly end up with robot driven gasoline cars, to give them the edge to catch criminals
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Stanford... where the acceptance bar is set at 100 hashtags. Fake news.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
Within 20 years, no one will own their car. We will transition to on-demand transportation services under the guise of reducing cost and time but in reality we will end up spending more money than had we owned our own cars.
If you haven't driven a decent electric car and lived with one to know how they work in every day life, there's no need to comment. Electric gives you flexibility in how you fuel the vehicle, instant torque, usable range and with Tesla, a very capable charging network when long range travel is needed. Is it cheap? Not yet, but once you've really driven one for a while you will likely not go back, there are too many positives.
I want some of what he's been smoking man
What happened to your apostrophe's?
Average car on the road is 11.6 years old. A huge number of cars on the road are much, much older than that. This represents a significant capital investment that millions of people are not going to throw away. The only cars on the road today that really offer gas-like usability are very expensive, expensive enough to pay for gas in a conventional vehicle for decades. If his predictions even come partially true, gas prices will drop making conventionally fueled vehicles more competitive to operate when compared to EV. He's an economist and should know that.
While I will not absolutely say that Stanford University economist Tony Seba is wrong. I will say that Stanford University economist Tony Seba might want to stop wearing his politics on his sleeve. Things may change, but AI for cars is not that advanced and I do not see it advancing to the point that states will allow AI driverless cars very quickly.
I will gladly pay for the "luxury" of owning my own car simply to avoid playing Let's Scan For Vomit/Urine/Feces/Cum/Spit every single time that I enter a vehicle.
Cities will ban human drivers once the data confirms how dangerous they can be behind a wheel. This will spread to suburbs, and then beyond.
People wouldn't wait to vote the lawmakers that did this out of office. They'd drag them into, then through, the streets. Most likely in petrol-fueled vehicles.
Hey Slashdot,
This is great for your proposal of a Universal Basic Income.
Free money, a free car nobody wants, and nearly free gasoline.
This is proof that economics is not a hard science
It is quite dismal isn't it? :-)
SlashDot, go ahead and turn off auto-renew on the domain, die with a shred of dignity left, or change your tagline to "/. Yesterday's News Today."
Eight years is a blink of an eye in terms of car history. It takes that long just to design a new model and bring it to market. All the major car companies have been struggling for a couple of decades to get electric cars right. Only Tesla has come close, and even their cars are limited to commuting because of their limited range. Maybe in eight decades we will have abandoned fossil fuel cars, but even that is not a foregone conclusion.
> Self Driven On Demand EVs
Self Driven Uber Car Kills Baby, Periscope Footage at Eleven
Lawyers will kill anything "self driven" long before it reaches critical mass on the roads.
..the article is stupid. the author is stupid.
who the fuck is going to pay for the upfront battery costs of running 12h stints in the middle of the winter in a poor country?
look, maybe in some 1 or 2 counties in california - but not in the world. that guy needs to get out more and check out the world.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
What everyone seems to be forgetting is TAXES.... yes, fuel tax that go to pay for those roads these cars will be travelling upon.
Even though they're EV, doesn't mean they float over the road. They'll be doing the same wear and tear that your normal petrol car is doing, just quieter.
We're already hearing governments complaining that improved fuel economies are leading to decreased fuel taxes...and that they want to tax based upon mileage.
Anyway, likely I'll keep my petrol cars only of my usage patterns. Yes, I'm an outlier, deal with it.
Tesla is a wonderful car that is extremely expensive and being sold at a loss. The company is likely to crash and burn. Even if they raise the price by 20% and start to turn a profit, they will remain a niche product for the rich. It is still cheaper to drive a petrol car when you consider TCO. Cheaper alternatives are arriving but even VW do not expect to have a full range until within 8 years. In most of the world you cannot recharge an electric vehicle away from your home and that is not going to change. Even in the UK you will have to go out of your way looking for a recharge point that works with your card. There is also the point that not everyone has somewhere to charge at home. If you live in an apartment and leave your car plugged in the local kids will unplug it. That is private cars. Commercial vehicles have a whole raft of new problems. Private cars normally only do a few miles each day and it may be viable for a second car but for a commercial vehicle we do not have a viable alternative on the market yet. Electricity does not have the range and requires stopping to recharge. Fast recharges shorten battery life and therefore reliability. Hydrogen is great but people fear it and it is not available. This is not going to happen in 8 years but it will happen. I hope that there will be a time in the future when we have hydrogen/electric hybrids that can do the day to day on electric and do the extended journeys using hydrogen but that is a distant dream. Current technology cannot replace petrol yet.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
While the relative price of electricity might be cheaper things to consider:
1. Adding many more electric vehicles will add additional load on the grid, undetermined what this will do with the cost of electricity. But saying it eliminates fossil fues is wrong as most plants at this point are at least Natural gas. Some are still coal with nuclear ones going offline.
2. Sales of cars etc provide a lot of taxes from fuel sales to fund road construction that will have to be replaced so cost per mile on EV's will go up.
3. If EVs are selling themselves I bet the tax break will vanish as quickly as well.
4. So maybe self driving cars could become more dominant in Urban Cities with AI helping congestion etc. But probably longer then 8 years in suburbs and I'm still not convinced driving + charging time is convenient for long distance trips.
~$150 USD will buy a Windows 10 laptop that would, in most measures other than pure storage capacity, outperform a wide swath of machines shipped with XP. ~$60 USD will get you a cheap Windows 10 tablet.
Still, we can't get people off of Windows XP.
I've owned an EV. They're great. I just don't think there's any chance that people will swap out equipment on the sort of time scale described here.
Does the power grid have enough surplus capacity to handle all cars being switched over?
I find being offended by me offensive.
Have gnu, will travel.
I think that if we accept the notion that electric cars are going to get better and cheaper in the future, then sooner or later, maybe not in 8 tears, but maybe in 10 or 15 there will not be many ICE new cars sold. I commute 25 miles each way to work. Most any new electric can do that. That would cover about 90% of my driving. Also, I have a cottage about 250 miles away. Still a bit of a stretch but I think a Chev Bolt could just about do it. Up the range to 300 miles and it would get me to the cottage in the summer and the ski hill in the winter. That would cover 99% of my trips. The odd time I want to take a driving vacation I would rent a gas car. Hell, we did that last year, rented a mustang convertible for 10 days and drove to California and back.
People always look at "now", and seem oddly blind to tomorrow. When digital cameras first showed up, I read somebody who said that digital would never replace film because cameras would have to be over 10 Mp to match the resolution of 35mm film. At the time a digital camera cost $1500 and had a resolution of 640x480 (about 0.3 Mp). Thing is, the digital cameras were roughly doubling in pixel count every year even at that time. Same thing with LCD monitors; The CAD guys at work all had $3000 21" Sonys and they were sure they would never replace them with LCDs. Now they all have 28" 4K displays, and I don't think you can actually buy a glass monitor any more.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
And not only will there be no fossil fuel cars on the road -- I mean how many cars older than 8 years do you really ever see -- but also they'll be flying cars! Because that's another dumb ass incessant claim that resurfaces every couple of years.
Breathless green-booster headlines will dominate a full 68.9% of all internet traffic, and 44.2% of all boring newspaper editorials will consist of musing about why no one seems to be taking the green-booster stories quite so seriously any more-- strange, considering they haven't turned out to be completely baseless fantasies more than about 66% of the time (an accuracy rate better than reportage on other news subjects by more than a factor of two!). This would be the leading subject for sententious discussion, except that it's edged out by musing about how it is we let Miami disappear under water, and how it is possible Ivanka Trump got elected president.
If the production cycle on a ground up vehicle is 5 years this means all designs will be electric only by 2020.. a really long stretch at best
This is completely ignorant of the process to create a vehicle. Most manufacturers take about 4 years.
Tesla's stock is buoyed by selling all of their carbon credits. They do not have the volume nor the affordability yet,
and it is probably a good 10 years before they will be affordable to the average consumer. Self driving cars are still
not 100% perfect, and a lot of people keep their car for a very long time, so 8 years is ridiculously short unless we
completely ran out of fossil fuels and their alternatives.
mileage based tax is not that easy and more toll roads are not that easy to flip from free ones.
You mean you don't vomit every day and have constant diarrhea?
Communicable disease, shitty diet, poor hygiene practices...all far more likely than Republicans to make you vomit every day and give you constant diarrhea. Maybe go to a doctor, because I don't think blaming Republicans is going to help, but what do I know.
the cost to charge your car fully from empty would be $0.15/kWh x 85kWh = $12.75
That is like saying oil is $50/barrel and a barrel of oil is 42 gallons, so petrol should be $1.20/gallon.
Who will pay for all the charging stations that will have to be built? What about replacing the EV's batteries every 1000 charges? What about the additional power generation needed? Tax?
If you treble that cost you are closer to the real mark. And when you do, your EV is getting close to the cost of a petrol vehicle to operate. That is a cost which we know the population and industry is willing to pay already, so it is not unreasonable that they/we will continue to pay it.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
If we move from gasoline powered cars to electric then for most part the grid will take up the load.
This is basically since charging is likely to be at night and it takes time to also build a solar roof.
So, anybody has done a decent study of the added load and distribution of load over the day resulting from a shift to electric cars ?
I do not see trucks moving to electric, the fuel tank si tiny on a truck if compared to the sustained power that the engine is producing.
Stanford University economist Tony Seba forecasts in his new report that petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks will no longer be sold anywhere in the world within the next eight years. As a result, the transportation market will transition and switch entirely to electrification, "leading to a collapse of oil prices and the demise of the petroleum industry as we have known it for a century,"
First off, the secession of sales of "petrol or diesel cars, busses, or trucks" will not immediately eliminate those previously sold off the road - come on, think about it, cars, buses and trucks have useful lifetimes that stretch in to decades.
Second, the market won't "transition and switch to electrification" - the infrastructure doesn't exist, and the required number of electric vehicles won't exist in any reasonable timeframe, let alone 8 years.
Third, the only reason the electric vehicle market is as large as it is because of government research grants that subsidize the design of the vehicles, government tax incentives to subsidize the construction of battery and vehicle plants, government incentives to subsidize the purchase of the electric vehicles, and the lack of government taxes on electric vehicles that lowers operating costs (since electric vehicles don't contribute to the infrastructure they rely on - highways, bridges, roadways, etc.)... These government programs do not scale to the entire transportation market - the government can't afford to pay thousands of dollars for EVERY vehicle sold and continue to maintain our transportation infrastructure without tax revenue. The elimination of these subsidies render electric vehicles more expensive and less practical than fossil-fuel powered vehicles.
Ken
We did an outback (Australia) trip last year and sometimes went for 1,200 kms without refuelling. While we had solar panels running the fridge etc I don't think we could fit enough panels to shift a 3 ton Landcruiser...
We didn't see any recharging stations out there either which isn't surprising since most of the outback isn't on any grid.
and continue our discussion then.
laws and taxation system of the state of California will not allow this. I guess he is assuming the formation of an even more fascist state government to enforce his predictions. Good luck toots.
This is the usual, painfully obvious futurist mistake of assuming that whatever is *possible* will slide into reality via a near-frictionless process. After all, isn't everyone in the world a rational, highly informed and well-adjusted adult with enough intelligence and disposable resources to embrace an unknown future? Surely, all that remains is a few engineering problems! Let's open AutoCAD and get 'er done.
Back in reality, the idea of dismissing "nostalgics" as some easily dismissed fringe, after what we just witnessed last year, is completely delusional. The nostalgics just chose our president and turned our country into a four-million-square-mile insane asylum. They are not an easily dominated curiosity, but a powerful zombie horde that will fight the future with all seven of their teeth and that rusty claw hammer they inherited from Pappy. There are a *lot* of them, they are angry and terrified, and they vote. And, like a typical American, I'm only speaking of what will happen in my own country, which is still comparatively well educated and forward-thinking - at least we don't have rampant malaria, endless civil war, or anyone called a "warlord."
What this article describes will, of course, eventually happen, but massive amounts of human problems (and legitimate, common-sense realities) will drag it through the dirt for decades before it looks anything like what this insulated, naive fool is describing. Maaaaaybe if he'd said 2050 rather than 2024, I wouldn't be calling this a complete joke.
The article was about new cars, not used ones.
And the way battery tech is improving...sure, why not? If there's a semi-significant jump in battery technology any time soon, something which a lot of companies are researching, it's conceivable that electric cars become cheaper to buy, cheaper to fuel, and cheaper to maintain. Suddenly you'd have to be pretty stupid to pay extra for a car that's gas, even if it means you have to spend half an hour re-fueling the car on the summer drive to Grandma's.
April first comes once a year but the fools are here to stay.
Even if we assume that assesment is true, then a lot of places in Europe, most notably european countries with crazy high taxes on anything car related...
will not see widespread adoption of non fossil fuel cars in the next 20 years, assuming the 8 years were realistic...
This is because most people in said european countries, buy cars that are 10-15 years old, simply because new cars are so expensive.
In my country, a brand new car costs the same as 3 brand new cars in countries with a more sane tax on cars.
This is due to an insane 200% tax on the purchase price of a new car...
I have never in my life bought a new car and I never will... despite having a fair income.
Check this handy guide. It's across the board cheaper to use natural gas in homes for appliances than electricity. BTW, I trust that source as I used to work with the author in the nineties and have followed him ever since then.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Oil is far too cheap and has far too much energy for this to happen any time soon. Where is all the cheap electricity going to come from?
Does the author of this paper/article have any idea how much oil is used to create plastics, fertilizer and countless other vital material that human beings use in great quantities?
B4 the motor law
Make Slashdot Great Again! Anonymous Coward is calling for a complete shutdown of article postings, until the moderators can figure out what in the hell is going on!
Seba's prediction is that new car sales of gasoline cars will be zero in 8 years. The click bait seeking journalist said fossil fuel cars will vanish. If the last fossil fuel car is sold in 7 years and the average car has a half life of 10 years* then there will still be enough fossil fuel cars on the road 17 years from now for gas stations to still be viable.
*the 10 years is my best guess not for how long a car lasts but at what point it's average distance driven is halved. Only some cars fail to last 10 years and have a distance of zero but the rest see their use decreases.
The only thing slowing this down is batteries and their raw materials. Experts expect ~150000 jobs to go away in the German IC supplier industry due to electric in the next decade or so. Thats high profile engineering and manufacturing we're talking about.
A modern German IC engine has 200+ moving parts, not counting transfer,clutch and gearbox. An e-motor in a tesla has 18 moving parts and is basically directly attached to the axle.
Conclusion: Raw materials for batteries aside, this study isn't to far off imho. What will happen in the next 20 years will totally baffle most people and will cough up a mix of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.
Don't be too quick in calling this study stupid is my strong advice.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
> But In Europe, the average age of new car buyers is already over 50, has been climbing for years.
The widely discussed study is for Germany, not EU and not Europe.
It also only takes into account buyers of _new_ cars (paying full price). Young people tend to buy used cars - they are much cheaper.
This entire situation looks very familiar to us Finns who experienced the downfall of Nokia. Remember that company? It is still there and making good business, however they have no position in the top end smartphone business. Less than 10 years ago they were number one, globally. That is the rate of the change we experience today.
Some of the /. readers interpret this article "Old Automakers Will Die", just like Nokia "died" from the smartphone business. That is not going to happen. All automakers will gradually offer more and more Hybrid and full E.V.s, at some point there is going to be range+price parity between combustion engine models and electric models, then they will start phasing out combustion engine models. Their business is building and selling cars, "car" itself doesn't mean that they *must* build cars with the same power source year after year. People will vote with their wallets, it will be that simple.
My current vehicle has a range of about 650 miles before I consider it time to refuel, and refilling the tank takes about two minutes. Battery technology is improving, and it might reach equivalence in eight years, but I am not optimistic.
This sig is a figment of your imagination.
Next 8 years? don't count on it. In the end yes, but that'll take a decade or 2 at minimum. Also the current tech is still in it's infancy and not yet ripe for complete replacement of regular engines. Within 8 years moste NEW vehicles that will be sold will be electric, but let's not forget there are a gazillion cars still on the road, and a lot of people just don't have the money to buy a new car, and will buy a used car, which will still in most cases be a regular car as elecric used ones are still pretty expensive.
And it's still easier to fix a regular car than an electric car, especially with the advances 3D printing is making which makes it easier to just print the parts needed.
So, in the end, yes the petrol car will go the way of the dodo, but not within 8 years.
Now if only they made a nice looking SUV (and no, Tesla's model X is NOT a nice looking SUV).
... please rent a few laps on the race-track like any other respectable engine-nut.
Please leave the regular roads to us normal people, so we can actually go on with our lives without having to fear being killed by some idiot.
Mind you, I'm not implying that _you're_ an idiot, I'm just telling the truth and making a reasonable demand. Seeing the way idiots drive on the Autobahn or through our cities has me praying for Google/Tesla/Mecredes-Benz/Whoever to finally get this self-driving-car show on the road. Like, literally. And this is Germany, where getting a divers licence costs north of 1500 Euros and equivalates to something like getting a PhD in Abstract Algebra, Training to become a Fighter Pilot or something of the sorts somewhere else.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
...that don't include anywhere with a marginal (or non-existent power grid) like most of Africa or India outside the major cities.
Or anywhere people can't afford 30K for a new car every few years (as the batteries degrade), but can afford a couple of hundred quid for a junker to keep themselves mobile.
Or anywhere you have to park on-street rather than in a garage - like most UK cities. Ever had you car "keyed" or the radio antenna snapped off by some local yokel with a few drinks in him? How about waking up to find you car unplugged or, better yet, the cable cut and sold for scrap?
Or how about the conversation "Sorry, dear, we can't visit your parents tonight, otherwise the car won't have enough charge to get me to work in the morning..." (actually, that might be an up-side.)
Or anywhere someone might want or need to drive for 300 miles without an hour-long stop to recharge the car?
Or anywhere you might need to carry extra fuel in the boot (trunk) just in case?
Or anywhere the ambient temperature might compromise the battery chemistry?
Realistically, the "world" in this case reduces to a subset of wealthy suburbanites in developed nations.
The reason that the internal combustion engine supplanted horse and steam was "convenience". Even in the pre-Model T Ford days, it was quicker to start a car than to saddle a horse or light the fire and build up a head of steam.
The convenience was present even without the infrastructure we have now of proper roads and fuelling stations, and unless EVs can match that convenience, they'll continue to be a niche player.
This sig left unintentionally blank.
America is in decline because we give fools like this titles like "Professor" and "Academic" and expect our younglings to swallow bullshit like this without questioning it.
I promise you no reasonable person reads something like this and goes "yeah, that's totally going to happen." They think, "what is this guy, a lunatic?" And, they would be right.
We need to do a better job of getting idiots like this out of academia where they do real damage to the future of our nation.
shell was aiming at 1000 mpg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joobOHZnxok
Only 4% of the World population live in US, only 37% of US citizens live outside cities.So no, we don't need to consider Montana.
I know what this guy's after. He wants to be seen as a visionary and not the whacko that he is. He'll say - see, I predicted this way back in 2017. Aren't I so smart!
No, you're not that smart. You're also not a visionary. You're just like everyone else.
that the people who did that study need to go back to school to learn how to study.
Since the Federal Government doesn't classify fuel cells based on "gasoline" as emissionless, and no other techonology has either the ease of "recharge) (i.e. fill the tank) or the speed, or the infrastructure that is needed, that pretty much removes everything from the list - and while I wouldn't doubt that a Democrat would be so stupid as to believe there are options, I know our present President won't by the BS that is being spouted... To get H2 takes apprx 5x the amount of energy returned, and is highly explosive, it just doesn't pass the safefy test as terrorist will show quickly.
So add all of that together and this is more BS...
I’m the transportation coordinator for a bridge girder manufacturer. Girders 150’ long and 140k are routine. I am currently doing the two months ground work to move two girders at 225’ long overall and 325k gross. I am not aware of anything even remotely close to being able to deal with those numbers for even a half a mile let alone 500+. This might happen in 100 years, certainly not 8.
Your sig here!
I hope it really does happen!
I can see this being something a person in the first world might imagine could happen within 8 years, if everyone hopped on board. But in developing countries? Even "second-world" ones like my own, South Africa?
Not a chance. Simply buying an EV for personal use here is both risky (because of the lack of charging infrastructure coupled with shorter ranges and many people needing longer ranges) and expensive (the Nissan Leaf, for example, costs about three times more than a similar small petrol vehicle) -- if you can even buy one (the aforementioned Leaf was (and probably still is) only a vehicle available on specific request, not in showrooms anywhere, mainly because the company doesn't want backlash from a consumer base that they feel will be confused and dismayed by the lack of infrastructure).
This vision *might* be something to aspire to within 3-4 decades in Africa. Even then, fossil fuels will still be used by people with functioning vehicles for as long as the fuel can be bought. The author also completely glosses over "petrol heads" (ie enthusiasts) as well as low-consumption fossil-fuel based vehicles (like motorbikes) -- again often the domain of hobbyists although staple transport for many.
I gave up on the eggheads after their fail on flying cars.
And can I get some?
It's no big deal to do. Here, we have plug-ins pretty much everywhere we park for more than a few minutes (and even in some of those places.) The reason is because we have to plug in our car's electric heaters for our oil pans and batteries in the winter months, or odds are the cars won't be able to start after a day at work, or sitting overnight or for more than a few hours anywhere. Businesses inevitably have plug-ins all across their employee parking lots, the hospital lot is fully populated with them, etc.
In cities and towns, I suspect that instead of parking meters, you'll just see a bunch of charging posts. You'll probably still have to put quarters in them. Or dollars. Don't think of it as an inconvenience to do: think of it as a new way to get money out of people parking. Then all of a sudden the rise of the appropriate infrastructure becomes obvious and inevitable. Nothing gets infrastructure built like the lure of income.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yes. Everyone in the United States willingly accepts an amount of risk so that all of us may remain free. This is reasonable, moral, and correct. Those not willing to live free can GTFO.
They charge an extra $200/year for each electric car you own.
In 8 years time, when we no longer need oil for fuelling transport, what will happen in the Middle East?
All those rich countries becoming poorer will suddenly have a revolution on their hands.
At the rate I'm going, my car won't be paid off in 8 years so this prediction must be driving bankers who make auto loans crazy.
So 7 years from now, everyone that buys a new ICE car will agree to only keep that car for 1 year? And then everyone's going to go out and immediately buy a new 1 again?
I get that battery may be cheaper than gas by then (I wonder if the increased demand for electric from everyone switching has been accounted for in cost calculations), but keeping my existing car will still be much cheaper than throwing my car away (cant really sell it back, ICE cars are now useless) and buying a new 1.
I said this twenty five years ago, when I was 12. I said it because it was predicted back then too.
It's been twenty five years, and I've learned something.
Socient doesn't move that fast.
Sorry.
And 2018 will be the year of the Linux Desktop, where it finally displaces Windows in the enterprise.
If electric cars get a significant market share (25%+) wouldn't we end up with a gasoline glut that would drive the price down to almost nothing? I can't find any postings here that take that into consideration.
I would still take an electric car over an ICE car for myself but it is hard to believe that 100% market share is possible.
But do you know why electricity is cheaper? Because "in many places", gasoline/diesel is taxed well over 100%. In Texas right now, gasoline has been averaging around $2.00/gal if you average it over the past year or so. Taxes are probably around 40-50cents/gal of that price, and station profits are around 5-10 cents/gal. In Europe, prices are over a dollar a liter, with approx. 4 liters to the gallon. So what costs about $2/gal to refine and deliver (adding a bit because Texas is on the low end of costs) costs $4-$6 (or even more) at the pump.
Some of those taxes go to road maintenance, and without them, that money has to come from somewhere else. Look forward to EV mileage taxes in a few years once they become a more than insignificant part of what's on the road.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
So when The Rapture comes G-d will take the cars but not the people?
That's strangely understandable.
Tony, I want some of what you're smoking.
Even if electric cars take off as the author states Big Oil and Auto Manufacturers will do just fine.
Big Oil is not in the drilling business. They are in the refining business. They will do just fine. Auto Manufacturers will not do as well as Big Oil but there will still be a tremendous need for their goods and services. Tons of new vehicles will need to be built. And at the same time tons of new businesses will pop-up transporting people from here to there and they will need vehicles of different sizes and configurations.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
So this moron is the kind of people Stanford hires? I knew college was becoming a joke.. but damn.. Considering can notes are hitting the 6 and 7 YEAR mark.. and people RIGHT NOW are buying them I dont think there is any hope (not that there should be) that people are giving up their ICE powered cars anytime soon. Electric cars are still somewhat a novelty.. when we get to the point where even 10-20% of the cars you pass on the freeway are electric we can start making decade-out predictions. Until then.. wont happen. Anyone with a low end job can go out and buy a nice used ICE vehicle for 3 or 4 thousand dollars and drive it for YEARS at a very low cost. A major transmission overhaul on an older Toyota is well under a thousand bucks.. same goes for an engine rebuild.. and both of those will easily get you another 100k miles.. for the math challenged... both of those repairs is roughly the equivalent of 5 or 6 car payments on a new 30k electric car. You egalitarians at slashdot are always screaming about income inequality and all that other bullshit.. so you know the idea of a bunch of people going out and buying new electric cars in the next decade is pure fantasy. You all complain that its just too hard and unfair that the poor have to take the bus.. so we should ALL have to take the bus.. so what makes you think that would change because electric cars are a little more available. The same people that cannot buy ICE vehicles now.. wont be able to by ICE vehicles then. Petrol is extremely cheap and readily available.. when something comes along that is actually cheaper.. it will take over on its own..
Spoken like so many people who live in an urban area. Completely out of touch with the rest of American and the world. Not everybody lives in an urban area where a car isn't as essential to daily life. These same people often push the notion that nobody should live anywhere but jammed into a city living in 400 square feet. By the same token, Silicon Valley is out of touch with the rest of America. Not everybody has gigabit internet access wherever they live. Not everybody has cellular internet access. They need to quit building products that make these assumptions.
The total cost of ownership of EV's is NOT on par with gasoline.... Yet... And I don't think this will change soon enough to make us all give up our fossil fueled conveyances within 8 years.
The up front cost of purchasing the EV is considerably higher and last time I looked at it the cost recovery time exceeded the expected life of the vehicle's major component (the batteries). Now last time I looked gasoline was $3+ / Gal. Now, with gasoline about $2 / Gal the cost benefit is going to be even worse, unless the EV prices have fallen by 30% or so, and I don't believe that's happened.
Not to mention that it's a false statement that EV's don't burn fossil fuels.... Actually they do... They burn Coal and Natural Gas to produce electricity to charge that EV don't they?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
mileage based tax is not that easy and more toll roads are not that easy to flip from free ones.
You don't need mileage based taxes or toll roads. Just do what California's doing: add a hefty electric car surcharge to the annual vehicle registration.
If a significant proportion of cars were electric somebody would have to figure out how to tax them. The roads to drive the things on cost money.
And ... you fail in your understanding of the US and how it is organized. In order to form the US, the states had to agree to a configuration that gave the smallest states a forum (the Senate) in which they had equal power to the largest states. It was done to prevent the large population states such as slave-owning Virginia from overpowering states such as New Hampshire. They also a forum which was almost population based (the House) and set them to balancing each other.
So that 37% of US citizens has outsized influence on how the US makes many decisions -- witness that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but failed to become President based on her unpopularity in smaller states who disliked her proposed policies. Those rural and small population state voters will have an overly loud voice in determining how quickly electric cars will be adopted in the US, and will thus have a very formidable impact on how quickly the world turns to electric cars since the US is the largest market.
The Founders of the US were pretty sensitive to making sure that minority opinions weren't run over roughshod and that strong consensus was required for making policy -- they even had a filibuster in the House at the beginning.
On the contrary I think a mileage based road tax that also takes into account the weight of the vehicle would be the simplest method for handling road taxes. Most states require you to renew your registration every year, simply add an odometer reading to this process. The mileage difference from the previous year is then used to calculate the road tax you owe and it's simply added to the cost of your registration renewal. If the cost of the renewal would be high offer the option of paying it off in monthly installments or something instead of one big lump. For most people though this cost would probably stay relatively low, given the average driver in the USA is probably paying $1 or less per day in road taxes. The only problems I can see with this kind of scheme is that people might try to cheat the odometer reading somehow, but that is an issue that has been around for a long time and is unlikely to change in a big way.
In 2025, if I were to drive a vehicle as old as the one i drive now, it would be a 2012 model.
I might upgrade to a 2016. But I won't be driving a 2025 model. Buying new cars is a losing proposition for most drivers.
Now, if car ownership in the U.S. becomes the exception, well, maybe. But I'm not yet ready to subscribe to the premise that on-demand vehicle sharing is going to win that fast. And we have several massive trends converging - alternative fuels/energy sources, self-driving, multi-mode travel. Not all of these will succeed within the same time frame.
Ownership will be the last to change.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Stanford is in a very mild climate.
I'd like to see a study predicting the future which takes into account winter temperatures where it is below 0 celsius for three continuous months, with occasional winter nights to 30 below celsius, and daytime highs of minus 10 celsius.
How many miles of range does your electric car have under those conditions.
I wish electric car batteries could handle cold weather, but not seeing evidence.
To my knowledge, they have yet to solve the abysmal battery performance in cold climate problem.
It doesn't matter if all the other factors are jaw-dropping amazing. Until you fix this issue, your typical ICE vehicle will continue to dominate in any area where the aforementioned problem still exists.
I would also expect the power companies to gouge the shit out of their customers once ( and if ) folks ever start migrating to EV.
Children do not inherit debt from parents. The parent's estate, if there is one, will be liable for it after they die.
As for liability insurance, it covers up to a certain amount. The amount legally required by the state may not be enough to cover a really bad accident involving multiple people or a really expensive car. The owner of the car is responsible for the difference. Many policies cover more than the legal minimum.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
All of your statistics about electric vehicle range and cost to recharge vs. cost of gasoline may be perfectly valid and accurate. But 8 years is a short time to expect the end of an entire industry that's currently still thriving.
For starters? You've already got some issues developing when it comes to people trying to find suitable places to recharge an electric car. Tesla, who initially promised they'd place "superchargers" all over major highway routes that you'd get free access to changed that business model. Now, you have to pay extra to purchase permission to use them with a given Tesla. AND, people are starting to report long waits in line for available charging stations.
Gas stations, by contrast, are *everywhere*, and you can fill a tank in a matter of only a few minutes.
If you saw a sweeping change in less than a decade to most people driving electric cars? You'd need to have charging station coverage similar to the number of gas pumps available -- and I just don't see that happening that quickly at all. The push with electric cars, right now, is to convince most people that they're best used by recharging them overnight at home each night. That's fine for a daily commute but isn't the solution for road trips or someone who does a lot of driving as a courier or cab service.
Additionally, let's talk about the cost to redesign a vehicle. Manufacturers tend to keep a vehicle pretty much the same for at least a 5 year span ... and sometimes as long as 10 years at a time. (I just bought a Nissan 370Z and it's been the same car since 2009, other than minor changes and tweaks.) That's because a total redesign is a VERY costly proposition. I don't see any of them being too eager to just stop building gasoline engines and converting everything to electric. Market demand will ultimately dictate what happens ... but the logical expectation here is a much more gradual transition. Perhaps you'll see several electric car offerings for each of the major car makers, but initially, only the ones they think lend themselves best to a retrofit? Marketing will probably try to convince people that gasoline powered vehicles are the smarter choice for some scenarios, in the meantime. (EG. They could claim that minivans are best kept gasoline powered because the batteries required to move them are just too heavy, or take up room that allows things like "stow and go seating" today.)
What is this, slashdot or reddit's r/futureology?
Give me a break. You can have my diesel cars when you pay me for them or pry them out of my cold, dead hands. Preferably pay me for them. :)
My Fiat Palio Weekend is ethanol powered. We have this technology in Brasil for almost 40 years, since the release of Fiat 147 in 1978. #proud I am also awaiting for some motoparts in order to convert my Suzuki GS500E to ethanol too.
the steering wheel of my 1998 Ford Ranger long after that.
And in other fake news...
On that degree you got from Stanford! If you really think, the global vehicle world, will switch to battery/electric/rubber band powered vehicles in EIGHT YEARS, you are not only crazy, but should be locked up in a mental ward. The petroleum industry will not "collapse". For one thing, even if "fossil fuel" vehicles disappeared, where would you get plastics, pharmaceuticals (medicine)? Yep, a lot of life saving medicine, comes from the petro-chemical industry! Love these egghead "theorist" that have never held a job, outside the academic world. Book smart, common sense STUPID!
And in other news, reports indicate fossil fuel cars will be around for the next 100 years.... anyone can perform a study and come up with this dribble. In fact 90% of the time we are right 20% of the time. I love the 8 years comment, these people need to wake up and look outside at how many people are never going to let go of there gas chugging cars, let alone in 8 years. Ha!
~Bchickens
Chalk this up to the same people who predicted no snow by 2015, and beachfront property all being underwater by what, 2012?
The moronic cretins don't understand the scientific method. They find facts to fit their hypothesis, rather than taking facts as they are. Truly liberalism is a mental illness.
Pax Vobiscum
Do you really think that the massive, multi-billion dollar automotive and oil industries are just going to quietly go away in only 8 years? Whoever wrote this "study" didn't study reality very hard. There's no way these 800 pound gorillas are leaving the room -- or the cash -- anytime soon. Given the dynamics of political action committees and lobbyists in the United States alone, I'd be surprised if self-driving electric cars are widely available in 28 years, much less 8!
Not primarily selling, maybe.
I have a Toyota Yaris. It is going to last at least a dozen more years and could last much longer. I have a short commute, so a self-driving car doesn't really benefit me. I don't foresee buying a new car until my current car has been driven to death.
Also, electric cars are mostly small hybrids. There is a lot of work to replace the Ford Expediation/Excursion. There are still a lot of families who, shocker, have more than 5 kids and want to pull a boat or a camping trailer etc.
can we no longer publicize "predictions" by people who are so abjectly incorrect as to make one wonder what agenda they're trying to sell or what belief system has blinded them from actual reality?
This "study" is as likely to occur as some Christian Rapture or something.
"The author also egregiously underestimates the impact of a car's sunk cost. Even if gas soared to $20/gallon & electricity were free, it STILL wouldn't be economically worthwhile for people who've spent $30k-$60k or more for a car to just dump it... even MORESO if resale values tanked."
I can't think of a scenario short of outlawing gas cars thank could convince me I need an electric vehicle. I just bought an
(oversized) SUV and I couldn't justify that except the other one was 23 years old and as someone said the only thing left working was the engine. I only drive 3-4000 miles a year. Given the cost of insurance and licensing the cost of gas means nothing. I bought a car with WORSE mileage because it was thousands cheaper and the difference in mileage will cost me hundreds per year and given all the electronic crap in a 10-year-old SUV I don't expect it to last til the gas cost passes the savings cost in a decade. An electric car saves me money if we both survive another 50 years.
Given my situation at work scrapping perfectly usable power wheelchairs because the new ones are free, I have gotten less 'green' every day. Saving a gallon of water and throwing out a $5000 piece of complicated equipment hurts the brain too much ://
I am a government employee (non federal) in a blue state with a pollution problem and a strong government push to encourage electric cars and solar power.
As part of this initiative, they BLEW OUR MINDS AWAY recently when they installed FREE ELECTRICITY ports in the parking lot for employees with electric cars. For a while, I could not understand. Why spend extra money giving an expensive perk to employees when they already waste money giving us free juice for our cell phones when charging them at our desks? Then I learned the answer: they already have huge solar panels on top of all the roofs, and on top of the covered parking. So they just decided to share some of that free electricity with their employees.
My point is that, while I disagree with the "8 years" part of the article, one thing I did not expect to push electric adoption was this new idea. I can tell you this much: as soon as we heard about the free ports, two people I know immediately began the process of buying an electric car in order to take advantage of it. Five other people have stated they are considering buying electric now, plus me makes six. And that was just in the first few days.
Hopefully, private companies will jump on board with this idea. If nothing else, as a perk to offer employees.
Then my mind began to imagine further, when perhaps a new idea will take hold: "free electricity for all". What if this became a larger, more organized government push? What if we used taxes to build these ports everywhere and offered them to any citizen?
Of course, some of you will knee-jerk hate this idea because it involves taxes and socialism. But the rest of you, please imagine it...dream it....we can build it....
FREE ELECTRICITY FOR ALL
Riiight. And all those millenials, drowning in tuition debt, and the 43%? 46%? of Americans with no college are *all* going to rush out and buy a new car?
Everybody didn't even do it in the fifties; the ones who did bought a new car every two years. Any car you see on the road that's more than 3 years old, the owner is *not* going to go out and buy a new car; most of use buy *used* cars.
And, btw, how many people are driving hybrids? Less than half? Less than a quarter? And EVs are going to take all that over in under 10 years?
Thanks to emission scandals from VW and Mitsubishi, Europe and Chine have stronger emissions now than the US. China is considering a small reduction in EV sales requirements beginning in 2018 to allow the auto industry to get into production mode of viable EV auto's.
2018 10% of all your auto sales must be EVs
2019 12%
2020 15%
This story says that China is considering reducing that to 8% for 2018, 10% for 2019 and 12% for 2020.
http://www.investopedia.com/news/china-contemplates-easing-electric-car-quotas-tsla-gm/
GM alone as the 2nd largest seller of auto's in China sold 1.6 million auto's last year (2016). if the numbers stay the same, then in 2018, GM has to sell 160,000 EVs along with their 1.6 million in auto sales. VW sold 3.8 million auto's in 2016 so that equals 380,000 EVs.
To combat pollution, we are moving away from ICE auto's and into EV auto's. 8years is way to fast but 15-30 years for a complete change from ICE to EV is not unreasonable.
POTUS will have no affect on this as he wants to roll back the EPA, but the auto companies have gone global and as such need to build auto's that meet a global emission standard. End result, expect more ev auto's.
1. The vast majority of new cars in 2025 will be all electric or electric-biodiesel. This is true. Licenses and parking will become harder to find and more expensive for fossil fuel vehicles. You literally won't be able to drive fossil fuel cars into most major cities, except if you want to pay a toll on average of $10 and a surcharge on parking.
2. Many older cars will continue to operate, because old people and afficionados will do that.
3. Most younger people have already stopped buying non-electric cars, in fact Seattle is one of the top fast growing cities with decreasing car ownership. Only old people buy cars.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
How does your "need to own a car" clash with cars becoming electric and self-driving? That's a plus for you, less time wasted driving from A to B as you can spend your time doing something more useful.
The range is also such a non-issue. There are few if any places in the world where you would need that much range (maybe the Australian outback). Drive that 100 miles to the mall and back, twice in a row, and you're still not out of power with modern batteries. Now if you're actually going shopping at that mall your car is sitting idle - sucking up fresh electricity, of course. Why wait until your battery is nearly empty before refueling?
Kumbaya, brother, kumbaya.
In terms of legislation, you are correct. I am in fact decently aware of how US is organized. The main issue here though is not legislation, it's purchasing patterns. In 2016, US was indeed the second largest market for cars in the world by number of vehicles sold, outpaced by China and closely followed by the EU/EFTA region. However, US car market grows at 4% per year, EU by 7% and China by 13% over the last 4 years. If that trend holds, the Chinese car market will be more than twice as big as the US in 8 years. At the same time, rural population percentage in US will drop further due to continued urbanization. http://www.best-selling-cars.c... I would further argue that new car sales happen more in densely populated high income areas and used cars go to low income rural areas to a greater extent. The Montanas of the world will have an ample supply of second hand clunkers for a long time. Based on gas price versus electricity price, the break-even point for electric cars come much sooner in EU (EU 4.5-7 $/gallon) and China (3.6$/gallon) than in US (2.6$/gallon) http://www.globalpetrolprices.... All of this will lead to that there is going to be a huge push towards electric cars over the coming years, which in turn will lead to efficiencies of scale and lower prices. I do believe that the interviewee of the original article is too optimistic on time, but I expect electric cars will beat gas cars on TCO over the life of the car in Europe already 2018 or latest 2019. I may have overstated the percentage of US citizens living in rural areas, most of the references I see has the number around 20%, not 37.
Read TFA. First of all, he is referring to dog years, so in earth orbits, that is 7 * 8 = 56 earth orbits. Also, if you inspect the footnotes, the reason no such vehicles will be sold is that the North Korean global nuclear war will wipe out all manufacturiing capacity.
The author isn't saying that electric cars will replace internal combustion cars as something that most people own. His actual claim is that private car ownership will mostly go away, with autonomous electric cars being the technology that makes that possible. A very different premise, and one that deserves analysis.
First up is the question of whether autonomous car technology will be ready quickly enough for his time frame. To meet the 2024 time point, autonomous cars have to be ready for mass production by 2020 at the latest and receive regulatory approval to be sold and driven autonomously. I think that's an overly optimistic date, especially for the legal part of the equation; that technology will come but I think it will take a bit longer than he believes
It will take quite a few years to replace the entire installed base of vehicles. Currently there are about 250 million small vehicles (cars, SUVs, pickup trucks) registered in the US and 17.5 million sold each year. At those rates it would take about 12 years to replace them all. Moving toward shared autonomous cars will reduce the total number needed, but it's still likely to take more than four years to make enough of them.
Another big question: will people be willing to forgo car ownership and do most of their travelling by using services such as Uber and/or public transit? (Uber itself won't necessarily be one of the important players or even survive, but if not somebody else will rise up to replace them.) In cities I think the case is strong; the economics of car ownership are unappealing, driving and parking are challenging and costly, and a ride in an autonomous vehicle has the potential to be much less expensive than taxis or the existing Uber because of eliminating labor costs for the drivers.
But outside the city things get murkier. Maintaining a viable car sharing service requires a high density of use, which means dense population. As you leave the city and go into the suburbs that density disappears, and the viability of a shared infrastructure of autonomous cars drops. A further problem is the fact that the places where people live and the places where they work are well separated, so the pattern of use doesn't suit the model; people will want to take their cars to their workplace, where they will sit unused or underused for most of the day until the workers are ready to return home. Meanwhile, there are few cars left in the bedroom communities for the people who are still there and want rides.
Eventually you reach rural areas, and I don't see the shared vehicle model taking hold there any time soon. There simply aren't enough people living there, and the distances people routinely travel are a barrier for electric cars.
A final question is whether people are ready for the psychological shift of giving up car ownership. I suspect that for many people, the answer is no. They see their cars as personal space, much like their homes are, and won't want to give that up. The extent to which that is true is also likely to correlate with where they live. Many people who live in the city are already using public transit and are comfortable with travelling in vehicles that they do now own or control, but people who have moved out of cities do not. I have talked to people who find the idea of using public transit horrifying for that reason, and they also choose to drive many hundreds of miles on long trips rather than using a bus or train because of their preference for private travel. (Flying has become its own horror show and I can understand people wanting to avoid that.)
There is also likely to be some resistance to autonomous vehicles themselves, aside from the question of ownership. Some people who value independence and private travel will not be prepared to let a machine drive for them because it involves giving up control; the fact that the autonomous car is likely to be safer won't sway them. Eventually some jurisdictions may move toward banning human driving for safety reasons and that will set off a firestorm of controversy.
Economists are always predicting gloom and doom and have predicted 25 of the last two recessions with absolute certainty.
While I have little doubt that EVs are about to take off, I highly doubt they'll replace new car sales in 8 years. If some of the new battery technologies and economies of scale kick in in the next few years I think we'll see them take 25-50% of the market by then. The only way they would take 90% or more of new vehicles sales would be if some of the pie in the sky battery technologies came to fruition or if something major happened in the fossil fuel industry (major regulations, market crash, etc).
Just like when I offered to buy beach front property for pennies on the dollar from those who seemed convinced that their property would be underwater in 10 years due to global warming back in 2000...I doubt anyone who actually believes this article will part with their nice fancy car that runs on fossil fuels for a bargain price either.
Just think, if this actually comes to pass we can finally tell the Saudis to go fuck themselves.
Some places in the world will require petrol for the generators to charge their electric LandCruiser 70's and Hilux's.
Obviously the author's never met someone who owns a pickup truck. Or an ATV. It's rather hard to go on a week-long hunting trip when you have to carry 7 days' worth of battery. America has huge amounts of land that are nowhere near a town or road.
8 years - no chance. I'm setting a reminder in my calendar right now to email this guy.
Now he does make a distinction regarding new cars/trucks Sold. Not really one the road. And much of what he is saying seems like where the world is going. 8 years seem fast.
I will agree that things are accelerating and trending in that direction. He's certainly not the first to suggest cars on demand. Mercedes is already thinking about this.
I wasn't aware the short bus stopped at Stanford.
Imma gonna just kept my car runnin for 9 years juss to prove this moron wrong.
I'm 99% sure this is 99% wrong.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot??
What about replacing the EV's batteries every 1000 charges?
Seriously?
Take the crack pipe out of your mouth and back away from the keyboard.
getting 2,000 miles per tank would almost be the polar opposite of a gas guzzler.
I'm never giving up my motorcycle
This post seriously made me laugh. That was a good one!
Now we know best cannabis in the world can be found in Stanford, CA and second best in Toronto, Canada!!!
In Canada's north we have the subject mentioned temperatures. Batteries freeze at around -20C.
No, the author is too too optimistic. However, as a second car, he may be right. The second car is used as one should use a bicycle. (short trips to grocers, etc)
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
A great prediction. I just wish it were possible. Even if (and it's a big IF) this sort of thing might start trending in bigger cities, I can't see it taking off in rural areas. There just isn't the infrastructure nor population density to support it. Maybe in 50-100 years. Certainly not in 8.
It is ridiculous to keep a car you barely use 95% of the time and for the remaining 5% your holidays are either just around the corner or require the use of airlines to get around because you have so few days of leave you can't waste them driving.
The HEADLINE was no, but as I was thinking "Yeah, no, it won't be 8 years, 8 years before nobody is selling them any more, sure", and guess what, the summary says just that, the headline is clickbait bollocks.
Or do you insist that the only car ever produced will now and forever be only the Tesla S?
HORSE Pucky.
You see... driving fast cars is like comparing Dick Size....
If I cut you off or over take you my dick is bigger :)
My dick really rulez if I zig zag through traffic smoke y'all and let everyone else know how small their dicks are.
The problem with self driving cars is that.... there are no dicks. To the dickheads that's like turning them into Virginas..... pussies... that's robbing them of their main source of self validation.
[sarcasm] Excellent! I've always wanted a coal powered car! Especially one where I can burn the coal in someone else's back yard instead of all over my town. I'm also excited to see all the new hazardous waste sites created by the battery manufacturing processes. This will certainly save the (children, environment, planet, whales, etc.)! [/sarcasm]
Journalism was stillborn. Just as Thomas Jefferson or Mark Twain*. Since a journalist has to write something that sells, he's going to write to reach that goal, if the best story also promotes some kind of truth, that was just a bonus.
On the contrary I think a mileage based road tax that also takes into account the weight of the vehicle would be the simplest method for handling road taxes. Most states require you to renew your registration every year, simply add an odometer reading to this process. The mileage difference from the previous year is then used to calculate the road tax you owe and it's simply added to the cost of your registration renewal. If the cost of the renewal would be high offer the option of paying it off in monthly installments or something instead of one big lump. For most people though this cost would probably stay relatively low, given the average driver in the USA is probably paying $1 or less per day in road taxes. The only problems I can see with this kind of scheme is that people might try to cheat the odometer reading somehow, but that is an issue that has been around for a long time and is unlikely to change in a big way.
One problem of mileage based road tax is accurately determining how many of those miles were in-state / in-county / in-city. My state has at least 5 cities which cross state boundaries. Then there are cities which cross county boundaries.
they pry my cold dead hands from the steering wheel!!!
If it would truly be a problem it already is a problem. There is nothing stopping anyone in those cities from always buying their gas on the cheaper side of the state/county line already. I'm not trying to claim that it is a perfect system but it should be just as good as what we've got now.
And then we store all our nuclear waste on the dark side of the moon, but it explodes, sending the moon veering off into space. Oh, wait, that happened in 1999. Nevermind.
The places that would REALLY throw fits if other states tried to claim 100% of tax revenues based upon registration address are states like Ohio that have lots of truck traffic passing THROUGH, and cities straddling the Mississippi or Ohio rivers (ex: Cincinnati. Many of its nicest & most desirable suburbs are on the Kentucky side, but nearly everyone WORKS on the Ohio side).
As a compromise, they might tolerate having non-commercial vehicles taxed by registration address & annual miles driven, but require GPS-tracked accounting for commercial vehicles (including taxis, fleets, and rental cars). This would put most of the annual revenue in the "right" place, but avoid the Orwellian implications of doing it to VOTERS. They wouldn't even have to mandate GPS... if large corporations were required to accurately document miles-driven-per-tax-district, their Compliance dep't. would demand GPS as a cost-saving automation.
US state borders are largely transparent to individuals, but quite real to businesses. There's nothing to stop someone from suburban L.A. from buying a non-CARB-compliant lawnmower at a Home Depot in Las Vegas & using it at home, but Home Depot *itself* wouldn't *dare* to sell non-CARB-compliant lawnmowers in California stores.
Yeah, but I think it's deader than it was before.
Most of that heavy commercial traffic is probably on the interstate system. So we could probably just turn the interstates into toll roads for them by collecting an appropriate fee when they stop at the weigh stations. That way you can avoid having to monitor and maintain GPS devices in every truck on the road.
Another method might be using all those automated license plate reading cameras we hear about periodically. Those are unlikely to go away any time soon, and the data they produce is going somewhere. I don't see why it couldn't be leveraged for road tax purposes. Although the fact that you could probably do such a thing might generate enough public ire to get them removed.
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
In the Lost Civilization scenario with fossil fuels we can at least harvest oil and do some home brewing refining and get some gas for the relic, but with chemical batteries this is not possible! Think of prospecting for ore, extracting it, refining it, activating it, deploying it... Relic, that is what you get from an electrical motor. We do not want all fossil fuel based engines to go away, but to be used were it matters most.