Posted on 05/19/2017 6:18:20 PM PDT by Lorianne
No more petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks will be sold anywhere in the world within eight years. The entire market for land transport will switch to electrification, leading to a collapse of oil prices and the demise of the petroleum industry as we have known it for a century.
This is the futuristic forecast by Stanford University economist Tony Seba. His report, with the deceptively bland title Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030, has gone viral in green circles and is causing spasms of anxiety in the established industries.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at financialpost.com ...
I suspect each illegal sneaking back to Mexico is traveling in a stolen car. That could account for all cars disappearing.
Fake news. Not even close to possible.
It’s a shame we ran out of oil because the last snow fell about 15 years ago. All the empty roads are snow and,ice free year round now. It would have been nice to have some gasoline to power up the old buggy parked in the driveway and be able to drive without slip, sliding around.
Better tell Jay Leno and Reggie Jackson.
I worked in the factory where they made fire hydrants. It was a great job, but you couldn’t park anywhere near the place.
Not really relevant, except it’s also from Steven Wright.
Luv your statement. If I had the money, I’d buy a 57 Chevy Belair, 3 deuces, red and white, baby moons with spinners. in my mother’s 210 I was able to put in 8 girls. That was 7 for my date and one for a spare. Good cars will never go away. Hack professors will, hopefully, very soon.
It’s actually “from a better, vanished time.” He doesn’t really pause at the comma, so it’s easy to hear it your way.
https://www.rush.com/songs/red-barchetta/
Is that you, Taggart, you provincial putz?
I’m with you. I used to
drive from Houston to
Roswell over all major
holidays. Twelve hours
straight thru. One
stretch where it’s
almost 200 miles between
fill ups. There is virtually
nothing out there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eULGEKncHvI
I was hoping to make the first reference to a red Barchetta. Notice that the article uses the word “petrol”. I could almost see the EU trying to push this through. It won’t happen in America - there will always be a demand for the freedom that a car provides. (A real car - that can go from California to NY stopping only for fuel and rest rooms).
If they stopped selling all fossil-fueled cars in 8 years it would look like Cuba in 30 years with nothing but old cars being kept up as well as possible on the road with gas stations even more plentiful than ever.
What a maroon!
Only a Stanford intellectual could be so stupid.
Sounds good to me. My wife and I together own, and regularly drive 5 cars (and another 12, or so, tractors and boats). All but 2 of the cars are from the last century, and all of the tractors boats are. The average age of all of them is well over a quarter century. Another eight years is barely another blip. With all the petroleum production and refinery capacity still around in eight years, the price for fuel will be negligible.
My 76 yr old Ford 9n tractor is still going strong.
Would have to have batteries weighing more than the tractor to haul that chunk of iron around.
And you believe all that bull, RIGHT?
I’m selling the Brooklyn Bridge. I sent this guy an email.
“And you believe all that bull, RIGHT?”
Can you make a coherent argument supported by facts, or just fling your crap around like a monkey in a cage?
Really, if you have nothing to add, it is better to say nothing.
Do you logically refute any point that I made?
While I’m no opponent of electric cars I’ll just say that this article is pure porn for leftist mental masturbation. The only way this could come about would be by force of edict and that is not going to happen. I am, however, very uncomfortable to the point of suspicious of “self-driving” vehicles. I can see the potential benefits but I also see the thoroughly invasive control that such a thing will create. Makes me want to keep a pre-electronics vehicle with an internal combustion engine all the more.
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