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that you drive and that runs on gasoline – could very well be an outdated relic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.
