Tony Seba, economist at Stanford University, concluded in his recent study that the massive shift toward electric vehicles will lead to the demise of Petroleum industry as a whole. The demise of petrol cars will happen in just 8 years.
The study, dubbed Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030, predicts that consumers will prefer electric and self-driving vehicles because of their affordable prices, huge improvements in efficiency, life span of 1million miles and marginal running cost. Cities will soon ban human drivers posing safety risks and switch to autonomous traveling. Also, all new vehicles, public and private, will be electric by 2025, leading to drop in global oil demand to 70 million barrels per day by 2030. The current global consumption is at 98.30 million barrels per day.
Further expanding on grim premise, the study predicts oil prices as low as $US 25 a barrel, making deep-water drilling non viable, thus threatening existence of gigantic oil companies.
Tony Seba is of the view that future of transportation is in Silicon Valley and not in Detroit. All the big automakers, including German giants, will have to switch to EVs at marginal profits and invest heavily in self-driving autonomous vehicles, that’s where Google and Tesla have already established their authority.
And this demise of petrol cars will start in next 2,3 years, when EVs will improve upon their range up to 200 miles, while continuously decreasing their prices. They will be available within $US 20,000 to $US 30,000 range. The Tesla Model 3 is already priced at $35,000, before incentives for zero emission, with a range of 201 miles and is scheduled to arrive in 2018.