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Comment by pvarangot | Hacker News Reader

Traditional car stocks are at bargain() prices now.

() some may read that as sane, or trading according to fundamentals.

If you want some market crash hedges they are perfect.

Car companies are treated as government institutions. BMW and Volkswagen used to produce tanks. The German government will ask them too again if they start struggling to much. Companies like Fiat or Ferrari are as big a part of Italian national pride as rooting for their football team. Hyundai is 10% of South Korea's entire economy.

The car industry is political. Anyone assuming one company is going to sweep in and own everything hasn't paid attention. These companies will be defended until the ends of the earth by their own governments, so you have a massive put existing for all of them by default.

When did BMW and Volkswagen produce tanks; which ones?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_K%C3%BCbelwagen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Schwimmwagen https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/bmws-dark-hist...

Sorry, apparently I interpreted "tanks" more literally than you do. The Kübelwagen and its amphibic Schwimmwagen variant were el cheapo jeeps, not tanks; BMW manufactured mainly aeroplane engines. Those "vehicles that they needed to wage war from the Urals to Morocco" mentioned in your third article were in all probability "staff cars", for superior officers, based on (barely modified?) pre-war standard civilian models.

So no tanks, AFAICT. They had enough other companies for that.

Only if your hypothesis is that companies like Mazda won't wither in the inevitable electric car disruption.

My guess is fossil fuel cars will remain competitive with electric cars (cost per mile wise), since the more demand for fossil fuels drop, the cheaper it gets to operate fossil fuel cars.

It really depends when the governments actually start banning fossil fuel cars. Or implements higher fossil fuel taxes, but I do not see a chance of that. And I do not see bans for new fossil fuel cars actually going into effect for at least 15 to 20 years.

Most gas stations will not change to charging station. Instead, every parking place will eventually have its own charging outlet.

Most gas station in the Oslo area in Norway have fast chargers.

The point is that when every parking spot is a fast charger, why bother with the gas station model?

Even in our way to get there, it makes more sense to put the charging at the origin or destination, except for long trips.

Every parking spot may be a charger, but not a fast charger. That would be way too much expensive, just in cabling for example.

The problem is that the infrastructure of ICE and oil massively profits from scale, as this drops many of these assets will turn negative.

Even if per mile the car would be competitive, the lost of value of the car itself would be incredibly.

Who will still buy an ICE car in 2030.

And that is before the new regulation that potentially makes these cars even less wanted.

This was my point. Gasoline will be banned for new cars at some point.

I would bet everything I own that gasoline for consumers cars (especially the pickup trucks so many love) is not going anywhere in the US by 2030. 2040 maybe, 2050 likelier.

Brand new fuel cars may be forbidden in many parts of the world.

I don't think this will ever happen in China or the US and if it happens on Europe we are more than 10 years away from that. I think the latter because there's no way European governments will ban long range cars that don't rely on a single vendor for the charging station network.

At some point gas stations won’t make as much money and thus will start changing to electric. The supply could flip with current electric charging stations which will move the needle.

We’ll also see what gets manufactured… there might be a time where few gas options will exist.

I do not see that point being in near future. All the infrastructure for fossil fuel delivery is already installed and can easily last decades. It will be a slow shift as more and more gas stations shift more of their space to electric charging. Or maybe they get obviated altogether since you can charge anywhere, but not in next 10 or even 20 years.

Diesel is still diesel when it comes to power too, and I have not heard of any electric alternative that can compare. I expect that to stick around even longer.

Seems like a pretty plausible hypothesis: Current car manufacturers already have car factories, they only need to put in electric motors in stead of combustion engines. New electric-car manufacturers need not only to put in electric motors, but build the rest of the car -- i.e. the facilities to build the rest of the car -- too.

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