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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

Possible corollary: "Tesla stock rises in response."

We may be heading towards a world of permanently low oil prices, as rising prices will cause more people to switch to electrics or plug-in hybrids.

Car buyers exhibit amazingly lemming-like behavior, switching to more fuel-efficient cars as prices rise and switching away from those fuel-efficient cars as prices fall. That process is likely to become more pronounced as electrics become more available and affordable.

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What kinds of car people use is irrelevant as long as the power grid is predominantly powered by fossil fuels. The number to watch is percentage of "green" power generation, which changes far too slowly to respond to market lurches like this.

Oil is not a big part of electricity generation in most places.

Major energy sources and percent share of total U.S. electricity generation in 2015

Coal = 33% Natural gas = 33% Nuclear = 20% Hydropower = 6% Other renewables = 7% Biomass = 1.6% Geothermal = 0.4% Solar = 0.6% Wind = 4.7% Petroleum = 1% Other gases = <1%

An electric fleet (powered by coal, natural gas, and nuclear) will reduce demand for oil, so movement in that direction is likely cause falling oil prices. Which could lead to more people buying oil-powered cars again.

I think the genie is out of the bottle with regards to electric cars. They've proven they work and can compete with internal combustion cars on most metrics that people care about and exceed ICEs in a number of ways. Battery capacity generally increases 8% per year, and battery production is ramping up in ways never seen before. The mindshare has already left Gas cars, it's just a matter of time before sales slip to electric, a bit like Nokia compared to the smartphone, Nokia were still shipping millions of units but consumer demand was waiting for cheaper smartphone units, once it did Nokia was destroyed.

By the time electric cars are ready for ubiquity, transportation-as-a-utility will have exploded thanks to autonomous vehicles. Why buy an electric car with less maintenance than a gas one when you can just skip out on owning a car entirely? Governments and/or insurance can directly or indirectly subsidize this move for the sake of safety.

Why would insurance companies do this? They stand to lose a TON by autonomous vehicles. Estimates are in the 60 to 80% of the market to go away.

Risk versus technological change is a dynamical system, yet many of the sky-is-falling estimates for the insurance industry myopically forecast assuming an invariant risk set-point.

For an alternate perspective of a potential (lucrative) future for insurance, see my post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12245312

I see but what happens if the parameters of the transportation systems are regulated?

I disagree with you, OP mentions 60% reduction in the civilian insurance market and there's studies to back that up- http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2015/10/23/385...

Any large scale car accidents will be re-simulated, analysed and scoured until they are fixed, the general public will not permit them to persist. This means a complete collapse of the entire industry except for enterprise scale underwriting of the car manufacturers which they may already have for recalls.

Russia, Saudi Arabia, USA, and many of the oil producers also produce natural gas. Oils can also be refined into natural gas. So countries who produce oil are not always dependent on it as their only energy export.

But when Tesla sells you a BEV, the solar roof array and household battery, and allows you to go "off-grid" with that car, the kind of car you use is relevant.

Yes, we saw people switch to more efficient transport in the US at $4/gallon. I think this is the long term ceiling, where people will switch to at least a plugin hybrid and cover 90% of their driving on electricity.

That's a pretty great point.

People started trading in their SUVs last time, this time they will be getting something that doesn't need gasoline at all.

I don't think OPEC realizes how dangerous of a game they are playing.

I wonder if this amount is tied to the cost of a gallon of milk in the consumer's mind?

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