From The Telegraph.
A future forecast by Tony Seba
Cities will ban human drivers
once the data confirms how dangerous they can be behind a wheel. This will
spread to suburbs, and then beyond. There will be a “mass stranding of existing
vehicles”. The value of second-hard cars will plunge. You will have to pay to
dispose of your old vehicle.
No more petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks will be sold
anywhere in the world within eight years. The entire market for land transport
will switch to electrification, leading to a collapse of oil prices and the
demise of the petroleum industry as we have known it for a century.
This is the futuristic forecast by Stanford
University
Mr Seba’s premise is that people will stop driving
altogether. They will switch en masse to self-drive electric vehicles (EVs) that
are 10 times cheaper to run than fossil-based cars, with a near-zero marginal
cost of fuel and an expected lifespan of 1 million miles (1.6 million
kilometres).
Only nostalgics will cling to the old habit of car ownership.
The rest will adapt to vehicles on demand. It will become harder to find a
petrol station, spares, or anybody to fix the 2000 moving parts that bedevil
the internal combustion engine. Dealers will disappear by 2024.
Cities will ban human drivers once the data confirms how
dangerous they can be behind a wheel. This will spread to suburbs, and then
beyond. There will be a “mass stranding of existing vehicles”. The value of
second-hard cars will plunge. You will have to pay to dispose of your old
vehicle.
It is a twin “death spiral” for big oil and big autos, with
ugly implications for some big companies on the London Stock Exchange unless
they adapt in time.
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TECH