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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.
"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
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!!!
>"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 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
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...
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.
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.
or just plain Austerity driving those numbers? I don't think the working class ever recovered from the 2008 economic crash.
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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.
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.
In ten years, most cars will not be electric. Not even most new cars will be electric (most cars purchased today will still be on the road in 2026). You know why? Stockpiling molecules is orders of magnitude better, cheaper, and faster than stockpiling electrons. That's not an opinion, that's both an empirical and theoretically grounded fact. By 2026, many new cars will have self-driving features, and I'll buy into the idea that by 2036, we'll be building or upgrading roads to accomodate self-driving vehicles. But autonomy isn't for free, and you won't be able to use them everywhere, just like aircraft are restricted to operating in certain places at certain times.
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.
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!
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.
Do you think it will be gradual like that? I would think that electric would completely take over as soon as it is economically feasible.
But maybe you are right, people will cling to what they know for less rational reasons, or fleet vehicles will still be gasoline until there is a charging infrastructure that your typical Hertz customer can use. There probably is more inertia than I realize.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
..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.
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.
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