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You assume a constant price for gasoline, which is a bold assumption, given that the oil markets are currently gyrating wildly, and have been for some time - we're likely to see prices at the pump go up by orders of magnitude over a relatively short timescale, which will provide a big push towards EV adoption, and will drive people away from older vehicles which guzzle gas.

No, it isn't going to be overnight, but like most transitions, it's going to happen far more quickly than you think. In 1905 people thought that most people would still be using horses in a century, that cars were just too expensive and niche, that horses were good enough. Horses were obsolete within 15 years of private automobiles being a thing - by 1920 more freight was hauled and more passenger-miles were travelled by internal combustion than horse, in the US.

EVs have been around for seven years, in a "real" form, give or take, their adoption rate is similar to that of the original gasoline automobiles when compared to horses.

I give it seven more years before they're dominant.

I'm also putting my money where my mouth is, and I've been buying up nice dirt cheap houses on busy, noisy, polluted roads. They'll be nice, not so cheap houses on less busy, quiet, clean roads in fifteen years.

>You assume a constant price for gasoline, which is a bold assumption, given that the oil markets are currently gyrating wildly, and have been for some time - we're likely to see prices at the pump go up by orders of magnitude over a relatively short timescale, which will provide a big push towards EV adoption, and will drive people away from older vehicles which guzzle gas.

If anything the move towards electric car adoption will make gasoline less expensive. Oil isn't running out anytime soon. We already have the distribution and refinement infrastructure. Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries will want to sell the oil they have before the market disappears.

Maybe in 100 years when gas cars go extinct, gasoline would be expensive. But for the time being, it's not going to massively jump in price.

http://www.salon.com/2016/04/29/there_will_be_pandemonium_pa...

You were saying?

The irony, or market working I guess, is that as demand for gas and fossil fuel goes down so does the price. This keeps the incentive to keep burning gas. During this recent price drop larger vehicle sales with worse gas mileage increased. I live in a city myself and its hard to realize this when all you see are smaller cars around, but in suburban, rural, Texas, larger gas vehicle are still the rule vs the exception it seems.

> Horses were obsolete within 15 years of private automobiles being a thing - by 1920 more freight was hauled and more passenger-miles were travelled by internal combustion than horse, in the US.

I'm not quite sure the analogy fits exactly. This is because the production (breeding?) of horses wasn't the most profitable industry man has every created. Remember still some of the most profitable companies in the world are fossil fuel companies. Exxon is still #2 and Chevron is #5. Also, unlike a company like Apple, they have been this way for decades. Brutal dictators are propped from oil. Entire countries rely on oil for their very existence. Due the the shear amount of money involved I do not see fossil fuels going quietly into the night based on market forces alone. As long as they are cheaper and more convenient for humanity we will use them. What we really need, in my opinion, is to #1 end the ridiculous subsidies that fossil fuel companies get and #2 enact a carbon tax where we give the proceeds of this tax to fund renewable energy research and to help out the millions of workers who will loss their jobs from the transition off of fossil fuels.

Here's another way of looking at it. In the 90s we had the big tobacco thing. 7 of these executives lied under oath that tobacco wasn't addictive. After countless hearings, lawsuits with rewards of the billions of $$$, high use taxes around the world, some of these companies are still around. People still use their products. They are expanding into emerging countries, vaping and maybe even weed. They are using trade protections to expand into those emerging markets.

Now take an industry, make it more profitable and give it millions of federal tax breaks and subsidies. Oh and instead of an economy of say Virginia or North Carolina based off of it have economies like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Nigeria owe their development from it.

I'm not saying we can't migrate off of fossil fuels. It needs to happen, and happen very quickly. However, its important to understand the shear size of the problem at hand.

I just posted a reply elsewhere in this tree that expounds my thinking on oil.

In short, I think uncertainty and credit risk will cause the oil market to collapse rather sooner than most anticipate. Read up on the current contango oil market - it's unnerving stuff.

Gotta call BS. Gas in my area is currently $2/gal. I think it's highly unlikely to go up "orders of magnitude" in a short timescale, unless you're intentionally using weasel words. There's plenty of oil around, wells are being capped due to oversupply/drop in demand.

Agree. And in inflation adjusted dollars, gasoline is about as cheap as it's ever been.

I think the "orders of magnitude" phrase was a misunderstanding of exactly how large an order of magnitude is. Probably meant "an order of magnitude."

I could see gas jumping to $20/gal pretty quickly if things go wrong in the right way.

Short of a revolution in Saudi Arabia, or something along those lines, oil/gas costs aren't going to go up 10x. Although gas isn't perfectly linked to oil prices, a barrel of oil isn't going to hit $450 anytime soon. There's far too much accessible oil at under $100/barrel for this to occur.

Exactly, people seem to forget how many oil sources are out there which become profitable at about $100 a barrel.

In addition, the fuel cost-per-mile (so I'm ignoring maintenance), is capped at about 30-40x that of an electric as we already know how to directly convert air and water into gasoline or ethanol substitutes at approximately that energy ratio (~10x the chemical energy, plus ~3-4x the thermodynamic efficiency of car versus battery cycle)

And MANY oil substitutes start making sense around $150 a barrel.

Lucky you -- where I live, gas is currently $5.48/gal and that's on the cheap end.

How much of that is tax?

Most of it.

> You assume a constant price for gasoline, which is a bold assumption, given that the oil markets are currently gyrating wildly, and have been for some time - we're likely to see prices at the pump go up by orders of magnitude over a relatively short timescale, which will provide a big push towards EV adoption, and will drive people away from older vehicles which guzzle gas.

Sorry, that isn't likely. We have basically "infinite" (50+ years worth) of Oil @ $100 [1] [2] [3] a barrel which is why all those shale wells came online when oil was priced higher. We've already been ~$100 for years at a time. Similarly, the shift to greener technologies is going to put downward pressure on it once it is back to the ~$100 baseline from years past.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-03/texas-toug...

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2016/02/29/the-break-eve...

[3] http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/20/us-crude-oils-break-even-cost...

> we're likely to see prices at the pump go up by orders of magnitude over a relatively short timescale

Do you really believe that in a short period of time gasoline is going to cost a few orders of magnitude more... that's 1,000x the current cost?

Post-fracking that's unlikely to happen. Prices may return to previous levels, but they won't move much more than that. Alternative energy will reduce demand for oil and therefor depress the price of oil, not the other way around.

He's just being foolishly hyperbolic with the term "magnitude." He even uses hedge words to protect his oracular status.

If your closest gas pump is 20 miles away fuel cost wouldn't matter anyway.

I also expect that a lot of pumps will be closed in cities because of pollution, smells and other factors.

Orders of magnitude doesn't mean 1000x - just 10x is enough.

As to fracking - the wheels have already fallen off, low oil prices forced a production hiatus, stop/start is inefficient and costly, and you need only look at the headlong rush in the UK that kinda petered out to get an idea of where fracking is going - nowhere.

The fossil sector is in big, big trouble - this chaotic oscillator will not stop until the market decouples from energy. The only question is whether they'll be allowed to collapse, or if we'll see state bailouts that keep them limping along.

As to reduced demand - that's also part of the problem. Oil prices are not purely demand driven, they have costs to meet, shareholders to appease, and massive capital investment needs that will not be met with a suppressed price, which will feed the death spiral they've been in for some five years now.

Where are you getting the information that stop/start is inefficient and costly for fracking? It's less than conventional oil wells. I've found a significant cost of fracking is establishing the wells.

If the price goes up that much, fracking is viable and will happen. The only way fracking is out of the equation if when low prices keep it from being profitable. Fracking presently functions as a cap on the price.

If prices vary wildly, then there are strategies to deal with that, and the variation needs to be explained. How does it come down so rapidly? Assuming healthy economics, probably because of fracking.

It doesn't make sense to say that market prices aren't demand driven just because other costs and factors exist. If suppliers will lose money at a given low price because of costs, eventually supply decreases and prices rise, etc.

Info mostly comes from banter with energy market traders who are getting ready for a mixture of feast and bloodbath. I used to work a futures desk, mostly on intermediates. I got a decent sense of the market in those few years, and watching it is an ongoing pastime. Re: the specifics around fracking start/stop - it's staff. You either retain salaried workers who are unproductive for stretches, or you work contractors, which is expensive. Either way it drives up cost.

Re the demand driven bit - I explained that poorly. Oil is a very "special" commodity, in that it has spectacular investment costs, incredible levels of state funding (and debt), and a price determined by anticipated demand more than anything else I'm aware of - you need only look at the volume curve across futures to see this - and the fact that we are still in a contango market. This adds up to the price of oil being driven by overall economic growth forecasts, which are theoretically demand, but aren't. This results in expenditure (exploration and exploitation), which has a several year time lag. Fracking has been oh-jesus expensive and may never turn a profit. Investors (states) are getting shy.

I'm still explaining this poorly - I'd need to write an essay to convey what I'm trying to get at - there are a few dynamics at play and I will be amazed if we don't start seeing even more instability.

Confidence in the market is very, very low. Talk to traders, not what the press says. Of course the press says it's rosy - nobody wants a premature sell-off, even if there could be some tasty dead cats in it for the vultures. We still need oil for energy for the time being.

I like how you got down voted for reporting your first hand knowledge.

I used to deal with a guy in the oil business. Reselling valves pumps and misc plumbing. Nothing in that business is cheap. Just remembered, Shell? did a drilling project few years ago in northern Canada. Spent $2 billion to drill deep wells into what looked like a large reservoir of oil and it was dry. And that wasn't $2 billion in paper funny money, that was $2 billion spent on stuff.

Nah, everything is clearly totally fine, and I, like the energy markets, are wrong. There has always been oil and demand for oil. There will always be oil and demand for oil. Oil without end.

Or not:

http://www.salon.com/2016/04/29/there_will_be_pandemonium_pa...

> Orders of magnitude doesn't mean 1000x - just 10x is enough.

That's "order" of magnitude, not "orders."

It's a vague term as: Other orders of magnitude may be calculated using bases other than 10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

In base 2, 2x = 1 order of magnitude 8x = 3 orders of magnitude. Worse both informal definitions are in common usage.

11x would be "orders", if we're playing semantic pedantry.

Wishful thinking, and backtracking as well. Magnitude change isn't 10x, and short of an increase in taxation, the idea that my current $2/gal gas will become $20 is just inane.

Interesting idea buying property on busy roads, but why would they become less busy solely because of electric cars? Yes, they may be quieter and cleaner, but you still have the eyesore of a road, and the associated people that roads bring.

Because with EVs we will see the rise of autonomous vehicles - once you have a car that is run by a computer and powered by electricity, and self-driving tech is available and affordable, it becomes a no-brainer.

Once autonomous vehicles become prevalent, traffic volume should drop, as we'll see less car ownership and more car use, meaning fewer cars parking, better traffic flow, etc. I believe the future of road transport is going to be something very like uber, just with no human drivers, and cars that only ever stop to recharge and to let passengers in and out.

The latter part of the equation (autonomy and associated behavioural changes) will take longer than the transition to EVs, and will happen, barring legislation fighting it.

As to the eyesore bit - I should clarify - I've been buying property on polluted, busy, pretty roads. Think A-roads in town centres, with houses on one side and a park on the other.

> Once autonomous vehicles become prevalent, traffic volume should drop

That's simply not true; not only will SDCs create 'empty miles' of 0-passenger cars, but they will make people more comfortable with longer commutes (you can sleep on the way to work now), and with average commute getting longer we'll get more passenger-miles.

Sharing won't really pick up (except on the low end, displacing public transport) because SDCs are pretty cheap as is, and people generally prefer their personal space unmolested by others.

As I said, "more car use" - I.e. More passenger miles - but you can still paradoxically have less traffic volume, as journies become more efficient but more importantly as freight becomes more efficient.

Re: the personal space bit... Not so sure. Many of the "younger" generation spurn car ownership so have no sunk costs, no personal space to lose. For the rest, it's going to be a question of marginal utility - and the fact that many car owners will get a train preferably where possible suggests that there is a case for non-ownership.

I mean, ten years ago your man on the street would have found it inconceivable that they would own no movies, no albums, that they'd just rent them - yet here we are.

Behaviour changes quickly when it starts, but slowly enough that you don't notice the change until after the event.

The younger generation is using cars less exactly because driving/parking/owning a car is expensive and a hassle, not because they suddenly prefer watching bums on the subway to watching Netflix alone. Choosing between Uber and shared public transportation is a question of cost, and self driving cars will get the cost down so it's much less of a factor. In all the countries where the share of public transportation is significant, the main reason is economical. Gas is more expensive in the EU, free parking is scarce, wages are lower, etc. Actually walkable cities help, but it's not like europeans couldn't find a use for a car if they could easily afford one. Or how about private car ownership growth in China [1]?

The other point is that American society is pretty well-segregated, and personal cars and suburbs ensure there's minimal contact between the classes. Unless your shared car service has tiers that allow that segregation to continue, a significant amount of people won't use it. Physical security is a part of the equation - you're probably not getting sexually assaulted or burgled in a personal SDC.

On renting vs owning: again, it doesn't matter - if the cars are not shared, this doesn't really affect the traffic volume (driving between drop-off and the next pick-up are empty miles, but that's hopefully insignificant).

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=16251

> In all the countries where the share of public transportation is significant, the main reason is economical. Gas is more expensive in the EU, free parking is scarce, wages are lower, etc. Actually walkable cities help, but it's not like europeans couldn't find a use for a car if they could easily afford one.

No, the main reason is government policy, most obviously in town planning. There's simply no place to park, and enough traffic that the journey is neither fast nor relaxing. The result is that people who could easily afford to (e.g. my friends working at Google or Facebook, or in finance) don't own cars, and use public transport to get to and from work.

Walk round the suburbs of European cities on a weekday, and you'll see lots of parked cars, in rich and poor areas. People own them, but don't find them the best way to get to work. They use them at the weekend.

If you own a car, the marginal cost of an additional trip is low (basically just gas). If you don't have a car, the cost of each trip will reflect its true cost. Basic economics will tell you this will lead to less trips, trip consolidation, other modes of transportation (walking/bike) chosen as primary transportation because ride sharing is there if you really need it. The really big cost that most people consider is parking. If large wasteful parking lots are eliminated, cities can become more compact which in turn will cause even more people to give up cars and so on.

As to your point about sharing, at some point if you want to be in the car by yourself it will cost extra. Again, economics...

"Think A-roads in town centres, with houses on one side and a park on the other."

Where are those houses so cheap that it becomes profitable to bet on the emergence of autonomous EV's only? Cheap houses are cheap in most places because they're in undesirable locations. I can imagine houses in commuting distance of major job centers becoming more attractive with autonomous vehicles (I mean, the commuting distance will become larger, i.e. the 'ring' expanding) but that expansion won't be hundreds of miles. And houses within this distance aren't that much cheaper that it becomes feasible to buy in bulk and hoard (well maybe you're spending hundreds of millions, I don't know).

Think Bristol and the like. Plenty of period properties in great locations, but smack next to traffic lights on an a-Road, therefore noisy, dirty, 30% or more cheaper than one street over. Often unrenovated as nobody sees any point in investing in a place that has its value substantially diminished by traffic, so cheaper yet.

No, hardly a squillionaire, just mortgaged up to my eyeballs and have three so far, eyeing up number four. Live in one of them. They're my hedge against the apocalypse not happening.

Aren't electricality and autonomy, as properties of vehicles, pretty much independent of one another?

The main goal of the car industry (actually almost every industry, but car is one of the most expensive things people buy in their life, with the biggest impact on environment) is to make people buy new car every few years, even if the old one is perfectly fine - they want you to feel like you're missing something in life by driving the "old model". I'm probably biased, because I drive a 1998 Mercedes, but I could easily afford a brand new one, yet I can't find a reason good enough to justify this - sure, it would be nice to have the interior in perfect condition, made from better materials, but everything else is just a gimmick. My car has 200kkm on the clock and is absolutely reliable, cheap to maintain, comfortable, safe and a blast to drive. If people would choose quality cars and drive them until they fall apart, there would be 10x less cars produced each year.

I drive a 1996 Civic and feel about the same way. I'll get a new car eventually (and getting an electric does sound awfully appealing, once they start selling models with good range for a reasonable price), but a lot of modern "features" like over-the-air updates seem awfully big-brotherish to me.

One of the things I like about my current car is that it can't be remotely bricked by the manufacturer, it doesn't have any built-in location tracking hardware, there's no way to wirelessly access any of the critical electronic components, and no need to apply security patches.

It's hard to think of modern cars as anything other than a rolling malware vector. Some of these cars will be on the road for thirty or forty years. What happens when the manufacturer stops patching their bugs after three or ten or twenty years?

Accidents remove a lot of cars every year. Other than that, I think self driving cars are going to push a few rounds of upgrades. Also, safety is still improving fairly rapidly so keeping a 20 year old car is probably a poor tradeoff.

The plural of Yaris would likely be Yares if it were Latin and Yarides if it were Greek. The initial “y” makes it sound more Greek to my ear, so if we’re going to have fun with the plural form, I’d suggest Yarides.

>>TD;DR, EVs will be cheaper soon the same way cars will all be driving themselves next year.

A used Nissan Leaf can had TODAY for around $10K in the USA. You can have a used Mistu imiev for as little as $7K. Yes there are limitations of range - but if some one is looking for a standard commuter, these fit the bill.

I'm a big fan of the economy/value of used cars, but I don't think that we'll be seeing 15 year old used lithium-batteried EVs being viable. The capacity losses from time on the Li batteries are just too severe over that timeframe, and dumping oil into a 15-year old IC engine is worthwhile. Renewing the battery pack on a 10-15 year old EV isn't worthwhile (or is worthwhile, but puts a floor on the used car price).

My household has a 190K mile, 2005 Honda CR-V and a 6K mile 2015 LEAF. That Honda is likely to be viable beyond when the LEAF is viable. (Assuming no accidents, rust will eventually get the Honda and battery capacity will get the LEAF.)

Dunno - you could get a used G Wiz. http://www.goingreen.co.uk/product/g-wiz-dc-midnight/

Costs almost nothing

Bit rubbish though