AEP’s Weekly Electric Car Rant

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
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By Paul Homewood

AEP is on his regular electric car rant today.

Morgan Stanley is betting that electric cars will corner 70pc of the European vehicle market by the middle of century, leading to a drastic upheaval for the power sector and scramble for dominance of lucrative new technologies.

Global banks in London and New York are no longer debating whether the switch-over will occur. Research reports have shifted to granular analysis over what this means for large swathes of the economy, and who will be the winners and losers as the old edifice crumbles.

A report this week from Nicholas Ashworth and Carolina Dores at Morgan Stanley says a ratchet effect is underway. It is becoming more costly each year to develop petrol and diesel cars that comply with tightening rules on emissions of CO2 and particulates (NOx), yet the cost of EV batteries keeps falling. The crossover point will arrive in the mid-2020s.

They expect global EV sales to reach one billion annually by 2050, pulling ahead of internal combustion engines. The switch could take place much faster. A widely-cited report by Tony Seba and James Arbib at RethinkX argues that it will make no sense to manufacture fossil-driven cars, trucks, buses, or tractors within a decade.

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I have already shown Tony Seba’s analysis to be nonsense.

However, the interesting bit is this graph from the Morgan Stanley analysis:

Even if electric car sales really do overtake conventional by 2050, the latter are still expected to be selling nearly as many as currently.

Hardly the disaster scenario for car manufacturers or oil companies that AEP usually tries to paint.

In any event, the notion that we can forecast what will happen in forty years time is plainly bunkum.

Would we have anticipated any of today’s technology in 1977? Very little, I suspect.

Would we have even dreamt of the internet, PCs, mobile phones, digital technology, and a host of other things that we now accept as part of modern life.

And I also suspect that many of the things imagined then have never taken off.

I certainly recall the experts back in the 1960s quite seriously telling us that by now we would all be flying around the skies in air taxis, living in 5-mile high towers, having robots doing all the house work, and eating synthetic food.