The end of gasoline cars?

About a month ago, I was thinking about the future – as I usually do – when I had an interesting question.  There are hundreds of companies around the world that make cars.  The ten biggest – according to this Wikipedia page – are: Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, GM, Ford, Nissan, Fiat, Honda, Suzuki, and Rennault.  My question was: how soon until one of these announce that they will no longer produce gasoline powered cars?  They’ll still make some hybrids, maybe some fuel cell cars or ones that run on compressed natural gas, but mainly they’ll be switching over to electric cars.  My bet was in ten to fifteen years.

At first, that seemed rather optimistic.  But I live in America where half the government thinks climate change is a hoax because otherwise it would hurt the profits of their fossil fuel benefactors.  Companies in Japan or Europe where they see climate change as a problem would be more likely to want to move things over.

Anyway, I had this idea and started writing this post, but then other things came up and I just kept putting it off.  Then yesterday I saw this headline “Volvo Plans to Go Electric, to Abandon Conventional Car Engine by 2019.” Now Volvo isn’t in the top ten, or the top twenty, but it now makes me think that five to ten years is a more realistic timeframe.  We’ll just have to see who of the top ten goes first.

Thinking about this led to a second question, once the first one goes, how long until the rest of the top ten do?  My original thought was twenty to thirty years, but I’m going to bump that down to ten to fifteen.

Of course, related to all of this is a third question, which is which company on that list will be the first to switch over entirely to making autonomously controlled vehicles?  I’d say that the first one will be in ten to fifteen years, but then the rest will switch over within five to ten after that. 

So I’m predicting that the car of today – that you drive and that runs on gasoline – could very well be an outdated relic in about twenty years.

An energy question

Let’s suppose there are only two energy sources.  We’ll call them Energy Source A and Energy Source B.  Pound for pound – if that makes any sense since these two are very different – you can get ten times as much energy from A than B.  A lot of people would then say, “We should use Energy Source A then,” without looking any further into the matter.

But those who do look further note a few things.  A vital component of Energy Source A – the fuel, a special metal needed for the power plant, something – is located at random areas around the globe.  This means that if your country didn’t win the geography lottery and has this vital component, you have to import it.  Meaning that foreign elements could disrupt your supply of it.  Also, some countries may go to war to secure a supply of it, only to disrupt the global trading of it.  On the other hand, you could set up an Energy Source B power plant pretty much anywhere.  Does the added cost of securing the supply of the vital component of Energy Source A diminish its superiority?

Also, the normal size of an Energy Source A power plant supplies enough power for an entire city.  You could build a massive Energy Source B power plant to supply power to a city, but you could also build smaller plants that supplies power to a suburb, or a handful of neighborhoods in the city.  Some people would say that Energy Source A is clearly better because you can supply more people with more power from one plant.  But what if something goes wrong, such as a mechanical failure or even a terrorist attack?  If it happens to the A power plant, you knock out power to an entire city.  But if it happened at a B power plant, you just knock out power to a few neighborhoods. 

Given these scenarios, is Energy Source A still better than B?