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Comment by JulianMorrison | Hacker News Reader

Another reason things will change fast is that, like film cameras, gasoline cars have a long logistical tail. As soon as they start to fall out of favour, there's a feedback loop. Suppliers and mechanics close close. Fuel prices rise as fixed costs are amortized over fewer buyers. Gas stations are further away. You can't get the fuel or parts, who'd want a car like that? And so more suppliers close.

Even if you are stuck with a gasoline car, can you keep it running? Many of those two billion cars will end up scrap or modified with converter kits.

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There's an alternate feedback loop. As more people drive electric cars, demand for oil drops and decreases the price of gasoline, making gasoline cars more economical.

I predict a bifurcated market: Cars wind up as electric while light trucks (and their large SUV brethren) stick to fossil fuels.

> There's an alternate feedback loop. As more people drive electric cars, demand for oil drops and decreases the price of gasoline, making gasoline cars more economical.

A car payment is maybe $200/month. Car insurance is maybe $100/month. 12,000 miles/year at 30MPG and $2/gallon is $67/month.

~$1.20 of the $2/gallon is taxes, refining, distribution and marketing.

So if the market price of crude oil falls by 75%, its contribution to a gallon of gas goes from $.80 to $.20. That's $20/month difference, or ~5% of the cost of operating a car.

And that's assuming crude prices actually fall by that much, and that governments don't raise the fuel tax to make up revenue and/or fight climate change. It's not hard to imagine adding $.49/gallon to the gas tax.

Governments will increasingly switch from fuel excise to road use taxes, in most cases removing the excise to help bolster their domestic oil industry.

Road use taxes are dumb. The only reason to have gas tax instead of funding roads the same way we fund the military is to discourage fossil fuel use.

And most governments, including most of the high population US states, don't have any domestic oil industry to speak of.

This may be true, but the cost of oil would have to drop below the cost of electricity.

According to this article, gasoline would have to be very cheap in order to compete with the cost of electricity. At one point the marginal difference probably doesn't matter.

The dismantling of the existing infrastructure might be a bigger challenge than you are letting on. I think that Tesla has the advantage of being a centralized, adaptive force for change, while gasoline and automotive suppliers are disparate and do not act as one cohesive force. There is a huge money advantage for the existing players, but perhaps their immobility will nullify that cash advantage.

The most vulnerable part of the existing infrastructure is "the little guy", gas stations that are franchises and can fold if demand falls below costs. But they are also the most visible part of it to consumers. Having to drive out of your way to get fuel would be an increasingly annoying chore.

I'm a little worried about the industry and workers that would be affected by such a huge change. I don't know what could be done, especially in the name of progress, but it's something that needs to be considered.

but neoliberalism is good and without any drawbacks. the unhaltered gallop of technology will have no bad consequences whatsoever.

I think you were trying to parody comments on HN or elsewhere but I've rarely, if ever, heard anyone espouse such a view. The overwhelming majority agree that increased automation will lead to higher productivity but also cause unemployment. It's easy to write a snarky comment like that one, but I don't think it really adds value to the conversation.

There are definitely some people here who espouse the view that the technological changes will certainly create new jobs that replace the ones that disappear and there is no worry about unemployment going up. I think they are in the minority though and not really parody-worthy.

I echo your sentiments; unfortunately the problem is much, much bigger than this.

The value of human labor has been steadily declining for decades; driving down the political power of laborers.

Self driving trucks & taxis, delivery drones, robots, I don't even. https://vimeo.com/190609870

Our society is going to undergo a dramatic shift.

Yes, technology has created new jobs, but it has also massively devalued it; a highschool graduate can no longer support a family at a lifelong factory job.

> a highschool graduate can no longer support a family at a lifelong factory job.

It's worth keeping in mind that this was only ever true for a large number of people in a very short window in history, basically a few decades in the middle of the 20th century. Before that, you had (essentially subsistence) farming, craftsmen (neither of which could be done without substantial apprenticeship, ie education) or sweatshop factory working (which did not allow for the kind of middle class supporting a family you have in mind).

I am very curious what led that time in history to spread wealth so evenly. I don't know much about it, but for about 50 years technology was giving us such amazing, shared increases in productivity and standard of living that people dreamed of a post-labor society. (like star trek).

I met someone who's been with a company for nearly 30 years. When they started, everyone got 15 vacation and 12 personal leave days a year.

It's unthinkable now. Why?

I might consider a Tesla, but for the logistics of using one. I live in a western Chicago suburb and commute to a northern suburb. Despite the many commuting routes I take, I have never seen a charging station. I cannot charge at work, nor can I charge at home (I park in a garage in a apartment building that has no EV charging abilities or even 120v outlets available).

That won't be the case in a decade, though, yeah?

If you can't charge overnight, you really shouldn't have an electric vehicle. You end up MORE inconvenienced than a gasoline/diesel driver, instead of LESS inconvenienced.

Apartment landlords are coming around, quickly, though - it's a selling point and not all that expensive to install a few 240V outlets in the garage.

If you CAN charge overnight, waking up to a full 'tank' every morning is amazing! It's a surprising benefit that isn't immediately obvious to the new EV driver.

> If you can't charge overnight, you really shouldn't have an electric vehicle.

That's true now, but may not be so in a few years if aluminum-air battery technology continues to improve. Aluminum-air batteries have much higher energy density than lithium ion, but they cannot be electrically recharged [1] so when they are out you have to swap them.

The idea is that you build car with both a small lithium ion system and a large aluminum-air system. Lithium ion has higher power output, so you want that to actually drive the vehicle. You use the aluminum-air to recharge the lithium ion, to extend the range.

Current experiments with this approach add about 1200 miles to the range of the car compared to a pure lithium ion system.

If starting from full on both batteries you got 1400 miles, that would be enough to let a lot of city drivers go a month between having to go have the aluminum-air batter swapped out in the worst case where they are not able to do any plug in charging. That would be quite feasible for many people, assuming that there was a battery swap place within reasonable distance.

[1] In other words, you cannot recharged them by forcing a reverse current through them like you do normal rechargeable batteries. They essentially have to be rebuilt with new anodes, and the old anodes become scrap for recycling.

Sounds complicated. Musk has said that Lithium batteries are improving at a rapid enough pace that they expect impressive increases in capacity and duty cycles by the third iteration of the Model 3.

A friend of mine drives a Tesla. She can only charge at work, and that was enough for her. For context, we're in the bay area, where long drives are quite common.

I live in London. What garage would that be? Most houses don't have one.

Although I know it is inevitable, I'll be sad when my muscle car is driven off the road.

Cranking Red Barchetta at full volume? I know what you mean. Though I'm a little more saddened thinking of the day when autopilot replaces me at the wheel.

Yes, manually driving a car will become illegal probably sooner than one expects.

While I'd like to leave the driving to Otto most of the time, sometimes I really like to drive myself, and would miss it.

I like my drag racing manual transmission and clutch, it's a heluva lot of fun to drive on the open road, but it's agony in heavy city traffic. (The engine just will not run at low speeds, the clutch is very grabby :) It can be really hard to get moving uphill from a standstill without rotating the tires in place a few times.)

There's no reason why manual driving needs to be made illegal.

A much more likely scenario is that safety features, starting with AEB collision avoidance, will become mandatory.

This will progress to the point where autopilot will always be running in a supervisory role, ready to take over in an instant if you're doing something dumb that could harm yourself or others.

It takes about 25 years to cycle the road-going fleet

Older cars can be prohibited from using, first, HOV-style "automatic" lanes, then highways in rush hour, then highways altogether, much sooner than that.

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