In case anyone's looking for context on this, daily demand for oil is currently around 99-million-barrels a day, so this would be a 2% drop: https://www.statista.com/statistics/271823/daily-global-crud...
Obviously just a start, but still this sounds great to me.
Tesla has demand levers available to stoke additional demand when supply is not constrained. They'll have sold almost half a million Model 3s with no active marketing effort (besides a Youtube promo video here and there) by the time the backlog has been worked through.
Crude (Brent and WTI) is trending higher [1], which is only going to help EV sales. EVs are already a slam dunk TCO-wise in most of the country except where fuel is still cheap in the Midwest/Appalachia [2].
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/energy [2] https://www.gasbuddy.com/GasPriceMap?z=4
International orders (which are still in queue) aren't impacted by the Tesla vehicle credit phaseout. There's a reason they're going to push every car they can in the US first before that credit is gone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17542864 (HN Thread)
Animats mentions labor costs top of thread, which have been falling in Fremont now that they've hitting their stride (rumor I've heard, not material info, can't provide a citation).
If you're interested, highly recommend being on the investor call next month for Q3 rundown.
The question is whether Tesla can sell Model 3s at the originally claimed $35k, which is highly questionable. Indeed, Munro himself sells, "I think $36,000 Model 3s will be rare as hen's teeth. I don't see how they could make money at $36,000."
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/12/11/batteries-keep-getting-...
Any one of these issues would eliminate huge market segments. Once the used market for the ~35k model 3 starts to pick up, the first problem will be reduced of course, but maintenance costs remain to be seen.
There are 1 billion cars on the road. 80m are sold annually. So 500k is literally a drop in the bucket.. you can't get a 2% decrease in oil by selling 500k in 17 quarters, 10 quarters.. or even 4 quarters.
To get to 2% of cars, you would need to sell about 500k every quarter.
I won't quote the entire article here, but it's worth a few minutes of time. The EV sales rate is climbing rapidly; not exponentially, but much faster than linearly.
https://about.bnef.com/blog/cumulative-global-ev-sales-hit-4...
Even the article doesn't project the industry (not just Tesla) will reach these numbers in 10 quarters. Close to double that.
Keep in mind too though that direct percentages can have non-linear effects. Oil is very fungible, but the inputs have a wide range of extraction costs and levels of pollution/technical risk/geopolitics involved. A 2 million barrel a day reduction isn't going to shave off every input source equally, and oil from sands or ultra deep sea or whatever all have different kinds of effects. If it kills the worst first that could have a bigger benefit then a straight 2% would suggest.
Furthermore, there is a lot of oil infrastructure that is fantastically capitally expensive, most particularly refineries, that will not be equally effected. I think maximum plant capacity tends to be around 800k-900k barrels a day and many are smaller, and running subcapicity isn't ideal. Not all types of oil or products refineries produce are equal either, increasing electric cars would presumably primarily affect refined products, consider for example this piece[0] on refining capacity, and then consider what a significant bigger reduction could mean.
Finally at some point we should start to see more tipping points for economies of scale, the spread of enhanced charging networks, continuing spread of solar, and just changing public consciousness and people become more familiar with it. Public interest is racing way, way ahead of what the energy industry wants. So even 2% worldwide in that short a time would be a real deal and could also just be the shallow end of an S-curve. Next 5 years will be very interesting!
0: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-06/an-oil-re...
Oil-fired and dual-fuel units in those RTOs (NYISO and ISO-NE) also make up a pretty large amount of the total installed capacity.
CO2 per energy produced per million Btu:
Natural gas 117.0
Gasoline 157.2Coal (anthracite) 228.6 Coal (bituminous) 205.7 Coal (lignite) 215.4 Coal (subbituminous) 214.3
As you can see, natural gas has half the CO2 impact per million btus as coal. It's a great bridge until wind, solar, and utility scale batteries take over (natural gas ramps quickly, coal does not, and is much cleaner).
2nd, where did you get 10 quarters from? The earliest, most optimistic projection in that article is 2023 -- That's 17 quarters. Or 2025 - 25 quarters. Or perhaps it won't reach it until much later.
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/aug/24...
Those dirty power plants can also be replaced by clean power plants, instantly making all the EVs they’re charging dramatically cleaner. A dirty ICE vehicle is always going to be a dirty ICE vehicle, no matter what.
This is the same type of argument erroneously used against nuclear -- factoring in costs in one place but not the other. As though internal combustion engines, transmissions, radiators, exhaust systems with rare metal catalysts, etc. are not made of raw materials that have to be mined and processed.
The curb weight of a Model 3 is on the same order as a Ford Taurus or BMW 3 series.
There is also the question of how much longer lithium mining will have to continue at this pace, since in a few years there will obviously be a dense source of lithium for new batteries in the form of all the old batteries that can be recycled.
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