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I get that, but the majority of (somewhat older) drivers have probably not had an accident in decades, can't see them suddenly becoming a higher insurance risk. May well be a greater risk than a L4 vehicle, but nothing approaching an uninsurable risk.
They will still be a much higher risk than an AV once AV's have a short bit of track record. And, if they've not had a crash in decades then that means they are getting older at which point insurance in some locales (where driving is considered essential) will skyrocket.
 
They will still be a much higher risk than an AV once AV's have a short bit of track record. And, if they've not had a crash in decades then that means they are getting older at which point insurance in some locales (where driving is considered essential) will skyrocket.
Existing drivers may be higher risk than AVs but they won't be higher risk than they are today.
 
That's 2.5 years. We have to create fully autonomous AND build and sell a complete replacement fleet of vehicles.

I have no difficulty believing that fully autonomous is "soon", but replacing the fleet is an entirely different matter surely?
Yes, we'll see. Drivers are really really expensive. Not just in pay but in liability, treatment of vehicles requiring more maintenance, missed calls because they got lost, etc. Paying an extra $10k per vehicle will, I think, be an easy decision for taxi fleets and they'll be buying them as fast as they can be produced.
 
Existing drivers may be higher risk than AVs but they won't be higher risk than they are today.
Umm, higher risk or higher cost? Today the cost of that risk is spread among a gob load of risky drivers. The fewer risky drivers there are the much smaller the risk pool to spread costs out so each becomes higher risk and the premiums have to go up.

Update: On top of this is that quite possibly the risk for AV's becomes so low that insurance is almost not needed for them. Massively lower risk means massively lower premiums means massively lower profits.
 
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There is some worry about this, but Elon has been working hard anti-selling the Model 3 pointing out all the differences between the Model S and 3. The two cars look similar on the outside, but they really are going to have very different feature sets. The Model 3 is going to be a much more basic form of transportation than the S. It will be futuristic in a lot of ways, but not as feature rich.

I suspect the used market for the Model S is going to hold up quite well. It may even get stronger if demand for the Model 3 is so strong people have to wait a year or more. Those with some money will go into the shorter line and some others in line for a Model 3 will buy a used S instead.



There are plenty of threads on the ownership experience here. Probably 2/3 of the posts are about ownership topics. You happened to come across one of the threads about the company as a whole which is more investment focused.
your right ... there is a significant amount of relevant vehicle content on TMC ... just lost my head a bit with the extreme stuff :rolleyes:... they got my to read it :confused:
 
Let's not lose out heads.

If you look at the chemical composition of gasoline you will see it can easily be manufactured, we'd have been doing this today if gas was not so cheap from fossil methods. All it really takes is power. Peak oil is a myth, there will never be a time where hydrocarbons vanish by exhaustion.

Mix hydrogen and nitrogen and you have rocket fuel.

EVs are mostly right now enabled by compounded tax incentives. This gives Tesla the ability to sell you a $60k car for $100k, and the hype makes us accept the snake oil.

I happen to like my Tesla... except for the seats. I like my BMW better, owning both, that's my informed personal preference.

My 2016 MS has taken a 45% depreciation since new. I'm not complaining but his is real now and has so little to do with larger market dynamics than it does with it being a niche luxury car with serious drawbacks and some nice bonus features that the average joe doesn't really want. Otherwise Toyota likely sells more cars in a month than Tesla has ever.

Thinking of truck people, the F150 is the most common car owned by millionaires in the US... some people will not go to a minivan or sedan/hatch. There's more truck people than there are EV owners.

As for driverless cars, I just don't see a near future where it's more than another niche play, like AP. Sure there's some traction, but all it takes is some bad events, jacked insurance regulations, spotty legal liabilities, and we work out that highways are not rail lines. We're gonna be driving for a long time.
 
The term Peak Oil is used to describe extraction, not manufacture by other means (which I agree can be done), so I'm not understanding how it can be a myth. There's a finite amount that can be mined - notwithstanding that, sat here today, "more may yet be found"
The problem is that there is too much oil. We need to leave it in the ground. Oil companies will have to deal with stranded assets. The stone age didn't end because of a lack of stones.
 
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Paul Roberts point out in his book "The End of Oil" that even without alternative fuels we would never run out of oil. As new reserves become scarce or harder to access, the price will gradually rise to the point where it becomes too expensive to use it for transportation -- or anything else for that matter.
 
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Let's not lose out heads.

If you look at the chemical composition of gasoline you will see it can easily be manufactured, we'd have been doing this today if gas was not so cheap from fossil methods. All it really takes is power. Peak oil is a myth, there will never be a time where hydrocarbons vanish by exhaustion.

Technically yes, but you generally want to get more out of a fuel source than you put in. Gasoline as used in cars is a blend of different chemicals, but the core ingredient is simple carbon-hydrogen chains and energy is released when those bonds are broken. Making those bonds takes more energy than you get back, so it generally isn't worth it.

Now coal liquification has been around since the 40s. It isn't done commercially because it takes too much energy in compared to what you get out. As the simple carbon-hydrogen chains get longer, the compound gets thicker and more solid. Tar used for asphalt is just the "heavy ends" of crude oil. Heavy oil as produced in most of California's oil fields today as well as Venezuela has a lot more long carbon chains than short, but catalytic crackers break those chains down into the smaller, lighter chains used in gasoline. Los Angeles' refineries are mostly set up to crack these chains. There are also some refineries on the Gulf Coast to process Venezuelan crude.

What is called light, sweet crude is crude oil that is mostly gasoline from the start. Saudi Arabia's oil is mostly this and most of the early oil extraction was light sweet crude, but the world is almost out of that.

It's economically feasible to crack heavy crude, but liquifying coal takes considerably more energy and is not worth it. It will be a long time before gasoline is expensive enough to make it worthwhile.

As far as "peak oil" is concerned, I do agree with you that we aren't running out of oil, but we are running out of cheap oil. Thick oil was mined from tar pits for various purposes for centuries, but the first oil wells drilled into the earth didn't happen until the 19th century. The initial oil was very expensive and they dumped the useless byproduct of refining, gasoline into streams because all they wanted was lamp oil. The oil in Pennsylvania was pumped into 42 gallon barrels and floated down the local river to the refinery.

Oil became a huge thing when large amounts of light-sweet crude were found in Texas and Louisiana. The oil in that region is trapped under salt domes and is under pressure from below. Punch a hole in the salt dome and your biggest problem is keeping the oil in the ground. There still are salt domes under the seabed in the Gulf, but they are so far off the coast now the water is very deep. Deepwater Horizon happened because the well was in a salt dome under pressure and BP royally screwed up on their safety procedures (the Bush administration had gutted the agency which was supposed to watchdog that activity so there were no safety inspections).

Basically all the oil we're finding today is either very heavy stuff onshore that requires a fair bit of refining to get gasoline, or the light, sweet crude is being found in very deep offshore locations where we really don't have the technology to extract it completely safely.

Mix hydrogen and nitrogen and you have rocket fuel.

I think you mean hydrogen and oxygen, though many different types of rocket fuel exist. I have never heard of pure nitrogen and hydrogen being combined as a rocket fuel. Nitrogen isn't reactive enough, you need a strong oxidizer for a quick reaction and nitrogen isn't that. If you combine nitrogen and hydrogen you get ammonia. Good for industrial uses, but not for rocketry.

EVs are mostly right now enabled by compounded tax incentives. This gives Tesla the ability to sell you a $60k car for $100k, and the hype makes us accept the snake oil.

That isn't why Tesla is selling the Model S for $100K. The tax incentives help, but the car still costs Tesla around $80K to make. The reason it costs more to make is in part because Tesla has to pay more for everything because their volume is 1/10 their nearest competitor. Toyota, GM, and VW can negotiate killer deals for everything from sheet metal to fasteners to sub-assemblies for their cars because their production volumes are so large. Additionally, an EV power train currently costs more than an ICE power train because of the cost of the batteries. The cost of batteries is constantly falling and Tesla has pushed that curve ahead as fast as possible with the Gigafactory, but there still is a price gap.

I do agree that if the Model S were an ICE from a mainstream car builder, it would cost around $60K. The manufacturer would only make about $2-3K on the deal though. Tesla makes around $20K per Model S.

I happen to like my Tesla... except for the seats. I like my BMW better, owning both, that's my informed personal preference.

My 2016 MS has taken a 45% depreciation since new. I'm not complaining but his is real now and has so little to do with larger market dynamics than it does with it being a niche luxury car with serious drawbacks and some nice bonus features that the average joe doesn't really want. Otherwise Toyota likely sells more cars in a month than Tesla has ever.

What did you do to depreciate the car so fast, drive it 100K miles in the first year? I just checked on KBB and my 2016 has depreciated about 20% in a year. If you are going by what Tesla or a dealer would give you as a trade in, that isn't really a valid measure, but even at that my dealer trade in value of my 2016 Model S is 75% what I paid for it.

Thinking of truck people, the F150 is the most common car owned by millionaires in the US... some people will not go to a minivan or sedan/hatch. There's more truck people than there are EV owners.

As for driverless cars, I just don't see a near future where it's more than another niche play, like AP. Sure there's some traction, but all it takes is some bad events, jacked insurance regulations, spotty legal liabilities, and we work out that highways are not rail lines. We're gonna be driving for a long time.

The large car market in the US has gone to trucks and SUVs. Sales of large vehicles goes up when fuel prices are low and crash when fuel prices spike. Right now I believe oil prices are being artificially kept low by the US and Saudi Arabia to punish Russia and Iran. The price of oil is one of the weapons the US uses to hurt its enemies.

Putin is desperate to get the price of oil up again because Russia's economy is cratered with low oil prices. Their GDP is less than Italy's right now.
 
I do agree with you that we aren't running out of oil

I used to think that compound growth, of the consumption, was the worrying factor. Sure we might find more, but even finding MUCH more wouldn't help:

Ages ago I saw an excellent lecture on exponential growth, but I've forgotten the source; you probably know it:

Some bugs are in a jar, their population doubles every minute, their current state is not known / important, but the jar will be full at midnight.

When do they start to notice? at 3 minutes to midnight the jar is only a little over 10% full ...

Just before midnight they find 3 more jars - three times as much resource as they ever had before. But at 2 minutes past midnight they will be full ...

With oil consumption increasing at 7% p.a. (I've plucked a figure, and I know it is high ... but emerging economies have populations wanting, and able to afford, more consumer goods) that's a doubling every 10 years, rather than every minute :) Still a pretty short time ... with constant & steady growth the amount we consume in the next doubling interval is the same as the total that we have ever used :(

But the things that are changing my mind are:

As renewables come on stream they reduce requirement for Oil. With, say, 10-20% renewables that's a huge reduction in the demand for oil.

So oil lasts longer ... but ...

... sellers are no longer making as much money as they used to, so are likely to lower their price. That makes the Renewable tech less affordable, fewer people choose to make that spend, and as a consequence implementation of renewables is delayed. Meanwhile sale and extraction of Oil takes off again, hastening the point of Peak Oil.
 
I used to think that compound growth, of the consumption, was the worrying factor. Sure we might find more, but even finding MUCH more wouldn't help:

Ages ago I saw an excellent lecture on exponential growth, but I've forgotten the source; you probably know it:

Some bugs are in a jar, their population doubles every minute, their current state is not known / important, but the jar will be full at midnight.

When do they start to notice? at 3 minutes to midnight the jar is only a little over 10% full ...

Just before midnight they find 3 more jars - three times as much resource as they ever had before. But at 2 minutes past midnight they will be full ...

With oil consumption increasing at 7% p.a. (I've plucked a figure, and I know it is high ... but emerging economies have populations wanting, and able to afford, more consumer goods) that's a doubling every 10 years, rather than every minute :) Still a pretty short time ... with constant & steady growth the amount we consume in the next doubling interval is the same as the total that we have ever used :(

But the things that are changing my mind are:

As renewables come on stream they reduce requirement for Oil. With, say, 10-20% renewables that's a huge reduction in the demand for oil.

So oil lasts longer ... but ...

... sellers are no longer making as much money as they used to, so are likely to lower their price. That makes the Renewable tech less affordable, fewer people choose to make that spend, and as a consequence implementation of renewables is delayed. Meanwhile sale and extraction of Oil takes off again, hastening the point of Peak Oil.

This scenario can be seen with bacteria colonies too. They grow extremely fast until the run out of space or food and then crash. Much of this scenario is playing out with the world's food and clean water supply right now. Hans Rosling argues that world population is in the process of stabilizing:
Global population growth, box by box

But IMO the stability point is too high. With a bit over 7 billion people, we're using up a lot of critical resources faster than we can produce them. Australia, Russia, the United States, and (I believe) Canada are all net grain exporters. Their grain is just barely able to feed the masses in the poorest countries. Many of these countries are completely dependent on the grain exporters to keep their population from starving.

A few years ago the world had a grain crisis when Australia had a bad drought, then Russia's grain crop was badly damaged by fires just about the time Australia started producing again, and the year after that American production was down because a very bad winter caused terrible spring flooding in the Midwest that reduced grain exports from the US for a year.

It didn't help that Monsanto accidentally made a species of rice extinct when a GMO rice they were testing got loose and cross pollinated with the medium grain rice grown in California ruining the crop and making medium grain rice unavailable for a while. It's still harder to find than other types of rice.

The first year of the crisis the US was able to balance the drop by pouring supplies stored in grain elevators onto the market, but that only worked for a year, maybe 2 before the excess grain supply was gone.

First rice prices worldwide spiked, then other grains spiked as the problem got worse. It triggered the Arab Spring. That started over protests about rising grain prices. Families were literally starving because they couldn't afford enough grain for a subsistence diet.

Right now the US is having a problem storing all the excess grain, but that's just masking a looming problem that could hit the world at any time. It doesn't even take anything as large as climate change, just a few bad crop years in multiple countries and the grain supply will be tight again.

On top of that, most of the world is running out of fresh water. Industrialization in China has increased fresh water use at a time when their underground aquifers are almost exhausted. Both China and India have been able to grow enough to feed their population, but they have done it through underground water supplies. In both countries the biggest food growing regions are a long ways from the coast, so desalinizing water on the coast and pumping it inland would be a major project and consume a lot of energy (even if they did it with solar power). China is currently on the deepest aquifers they can tap, water doesn't stay liquid at deeper depths and that steam is usually contaminated with all sorts of things that wouldn't be good for crops.

India's use of fossil water isn't as far along yet, but they are only about 10 years behind China.

There are only three places on Earth that have more fresh surface water than they need: some parts of the northern US, large parts of Canada, and Siberia. Everyplace else is facing a water crisis in the near future because they have used up their surface water and in a lot of places their underground supply too.

What will happen when China and India are no longer able to grow enough of their own food and need to import it?

This is all if the climate stays the same. If the world climate continues to warm as a lot of people predict, that would probably be the best long term scenario for the human race. It's bad news for coastal cities and other low lying areas which will find themselves below sea level. That requires a mass migration, but the warming will open up huge swaths of Siberia and Canada to both farming and migration. There are a lot of environmental concerns with millions of people migrating into these currently pristine areas, but there will be someplace for them to go.

If the climate does continue to change, I think it's much more likely we are going into a new period of glaciation. Over the last 2 million years, the world has been around 6 C cooler than it is now 90% of the time with brief periods of 10-20,000 years of warm like the current epoch in between. All of human history has happened during one of those warm periods. The ice records show world temperatures often spike upwards just before glaciation starts, and it's possible we are in one of those spike right now.

Over the last 2 million years Earth has been a lot warmer than it is now. 130,000 years ago (during the last warming period) global temperatures were warm enough a coral reef formed in what is not the Everglades. The average world temperatures for the last three warm periods were warmer than the current warm period and temperatures during the current warm period have been warmer than they are now. We don't have many records for it, but human civilization started right about the time global temperatures got really hot around 6000 years ago. There was also a warming during the Roman Empire that allowed Hannibal to cross valleys in the Alps that were ice free at the time, but aren't now. Around 1000 Ad world temperatures were warm enough that the Vikings established a self supporting colony in Greenland. The records of that colony show how it was slowly wiped out as the world cooled off again.

We have put a lot of CO2 into the air and IMO we have also done significant damage to the biosphere cutting down trees and poisoning the oceans. Records from plants collects in the early 19th century show the massive volcanic eruption in modern day Indonesia dumped massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, but the biosphere sucked most of it up in a couple of years. The ability of the biosphere to suck up excess CO2 is compromised.

But it all comes back to the world population again. Like a bacteria colony at the limits of its food supply, it seems sustainable, but there are a lot of underlying factors that are strained to the limit and the entire population is facing crisis if any of those underpinnings fail.

Oil is a factor in the world today. The entire world would ignore the Middle East and their squabbles if the place wasn't rich in oil. Look at how much concern the developed world pays to wars in Africa? They rarely even make the news in the US and get only cursory coverage in other countries. Oil production and transportation also contributes to world pollution, not just air but the oceans and land too.

We can make noises about the Brazilians cutting down the rain forests, but the US did it first in our own country. When Europeans got here, it was said a squirrel could make it from New England to the Mississippi without ever touching the ground. As Europeans conquered the continent, it wasn't just the native peoples pushed out of the way, but that massive forest was wiped out too.

The oceans' biospheres are collapsing in large part because we have a lot of mouths to feed and factory trawlers are scooping up massive numbers of fish leaving huge gaps in the food chain and sending the entire system into chaos. Runoff from farming is also contributing by killing off the bottom of the food chain.

I can't find it now, but I read an article about 3 years ago written by someone who occasionally sails yachts from one country to another delivering them to new owners. His article was written about his experience a year after Fukoshima when he took one yacht from Australia to Japan and then another from Japan to the US. It was the first time he had been out in the Pacific in about 10 years and the degradation of the environment was scary. They normally would supplement their diet with fish caught along the way, but they had trouble catching anything. He also found the amount of debris in the water even a year after Fukoshima to be amazing. Enough that even being as careful as possible, the yachts arrived at their destinations with damage from hitting unseen objects under the surface.

Most of us have little experience what the oceans are like out away from shore, I have never been in blue water. But from what I've read and seen in documentaries, the condition of the world oceans is very bad and ultimately the problem is there are too many of us trying to make it on a planet that just can't sustain 7 billion humans for the long term.

That was a lot longer than I intended. Sorry about that...
 
That was a lot longer than I intended. Sorry about that...

Very interesting read, thanks for taking the time to type it :)

I think population is flattening out - it seems that as prosperity rises families are delayed and size is reduced, and replacement numbers may even be hard to achieve (my recollection of the prediction back in the 60's and 70's was "runaway population numbers"!), but it will probably double once more before it stops increasing and your point about food production to support the increasing numbers is well made. At what point, given my bugs-in-a-jar analogy, will we realise that we have a looming problem? The increasing demand for meat (as prosperity in a country improves) is a cause for concern - 80% of the worlds agricultural land either pasture or feed production for livestock and Cows eating 7x as much as they gain in weight (Pork only 4x and Chicken 2x). World hunger solved by all becoming Vegans! As a family we have reduced our Meat eating significantly over the last half dozen years and I can't say I've noticed, I eat a nice steak when we go out and its become a treat rather than an everyday meal, and I enjoy it all the more.

He also found the amount of debris in the water even a year after Fukoshima to be amazing.

We were in the Maldives not long after the Boxing Day tsunami - the amount of stuff being washed up was incredible - even though the beaches were being combed regularly to keep them pristine for the tourists ...

the condition of the world oceans is very bad

I think the micro-plastics issue is a big concern for our children and their children ...
 
Very interesting read, thanks for taking the time to type it :)

I think population is flattening out - it seems that as prosperity rises families are delayed and size is reduced, and replacement numbers may even be hard to achieve (my recollection of the prediction back in the 60's and 70's was "runaway population numbers"!), but it will probably double once more before it stops increasing and your point about food production to support the increasing numbers is well made. At what point, given my bugs-in-a-jar analogy, will we realise that we have a looming problem? The increasing demand for meat (as prosperity in a country improves) is a cause for concern - 80% of the worlds agricultural land either pasture or feed production for livestock and Cows eating 7x as much as they gain in weight (Pork only 4x and Chicken 2x). World hunger solved by all becoming Vegans! As a family we have reduced our Meat eating significantly over the last half dozen years and I can't say I've noticed, I eat a nice steak when we go out and its become a treat rather than an everyday meal, and I enjoy it all the more.

Hans Rosling makes a good case that we'll stabilize around 10 billion. In most countries over the last couple of decades, even developing countries, the birth rate has stabilized at around 2 children per woman or a little less. What has made the big difference is the drop in child mortality. He points out that when most children at birth have a good chance to make it to adulthood, most parents stop at two kids.

He breaks down the population into age groups. The most recent two generations are the largest cohorts in the world, but it looks like they will probably only have about two children per couple, but as those cohorts age, they will bulk out the older generation cohorts and we will end up at stability around 10 billion. The problem is I don't think the Earth can really support more than about 4 billion long term, maybe less than that.

We were in the Maldives not long after the Boxing Day tsunami - the amount of stuff being washed up was incredible - even though the beaches were being combed regularly to keep them pristine for the tourists ...

Some of that trash had probably been floating in the ocean for a while and the tsunami stirred it up, but there was a tremendous amount of stuff washed out to sea from the tsunami too.

After the earthquake in 2011 some amazing things washed ashore in the Northwest. I think the biggest thing was an entire floating dock that made its way across the Pacific.

There is also a long term study going on monitoring Lego. Apparently a container full of Lego washed off a freighter in a storm and broke open. The Lego has been washing up on the beaches of the world for over a decade now. The study monitors reports of the pieces washing ashore and they are tracking how far the parts have gone. Apparently there were some limited edition parts in the cargo, so they are easy to identify.

I think the micro-plastics issue is a big concern for our children and their children ...

Micro plastics in the oceans are going to be a major problem for a long time to come. Plastic is durable, but that's both a good and bad thing. There is a banquet out there for some future bacteria, plastic is an organic compound, but again making a bacteria that would eat all our discarded plastic would also have some big downsides.

The micro plastics are so ubiquitous in the oceans I've read that if you take a cup of sand from any beach in the world, there will be some plastic in it.

Geologists date world events in layers of soil by spotting certain patterns in layers that mark world events. For example the debris from the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs can be spotted in soil layers throughout the world. Most of the world's oil comes from a worldwide event when most life on Earth was wiped out. Tiny creatures in the oceans fell to the ocean floor and the bacteria and other things that would normally devour the body weren't there anymore, so the bodies were buried and underwent Geologic processes that turned them into oil. When exploring for oil, Geologists look for that layer. Coal mostly comes from plant matter that was buried without decomposing.

Geologists can already spot the beginning of the nuclear age. There are some byproducts of the fallout from above ground nuclear tests that can be seen in the layer of soil that was on the surface in the 1940s and 50s (still very close to the surface in most of the world). Wine testers when testing a wine that claims to be from before 1945 look for cesium in the wine, if it doesn't have it, it was grown before that date.

The definitive marker that may really be a factor in determining the late 20th century and later might be from all the plastic in soil. When we're long gone and Geologists discover this layer, they might call it the beginning of the Plasticine.

I think it was the History Channel that did a series on what the world would be like if all the people disappeared. I didn't see any full episodes, but I think I saw about 10 minutes of one. They were talking about how fast so many of the trappings of our civilization would decay. Just about all the big things would be gone in a rather short time, though there would be marks we'd leave behind. Mostly places were we altered the landscape in non-natural ways and the tiny bits of debris that will never go away.
 
Maybe a better title for this thread would be "Buy an EV(not an ICE) ASAP".

About 2 years ago we were thinking of replacing our corporate fleet with fuel efficient ICE vehicles. Not anymore. As our fleet grows old they'll be(and are) switched out with EVs.

1. Economically, we think new ICE vehicles are a terrible investment. I know cars are generally not classified as an investment and depreciate rapidly regardless but we feel ICE vehicles are going to depreciate more rapidly than EVs going forward.

2. EVs are fantastic as company cars: low cost of maintenance, awesome mileage write off(pretty great writing off .54 a mile when there are no maintenance or fuel costs;)) good PR etc.

So yeah, hanging on to your old ICE prob not so bad(except for the environment of course) but replacing an old ICE with a new ICE a terrible idea.