petit_bateau
Active Member
Your comment illustrates a point I have made before, namely that this change will not be a benefit for all countries.As I’ve stated before in this thread, historically oil and ICE vehicles have made up a large percentage of the us trade deficit (before fracking, it was over half of it).
Oil and ICE are huge subtractors to the US economy. The US net imports about 30% of its ICE vehicles. The Us is a net exporter right now of EVs thanks to Tesla.
So - obviously oil (and gas) exporters will see huge economic negatives from reduced fuel sales.
But also - what we are seeing is that the shift to BEV in the manner that Tesla are doing it is driving the manufacturing ecosystem to a very different structure. Previously a typical automotive plant made about 250k vehicles/year, with the larger ones being at about 500k/yr being the ones that were the pacesetters, and the global outliers being a few plants of >1m/yr. Plus of course lots of outsourcing to tier 1s. What that meant was that even relatively small countries could have a bit of auto-manufacturing (even if not an assy plant) and as a consequence the overall balance-of-payments of many countries was tolerable.
Now Tesla are already showing that their minimum scale is 500k/yr and personally I expect Shanghai, Berlin, and Austin to be at 2m/yr fairly soon. And in a highly vertically integrated manner. In a way that the competitor BEV companies will have to mimic if they are to be competitive. Ultimately I expect Tesla to aim for 4m/yr, but let's just use 2m/yr per plant as a thought-experiment. If the previous typical plant was 250k and the new typical is 1m (and previous pace-setter was 500k and new pacesetter is 2m) then there will be only a quarter as many factories in the new world vs the old world.
So (for example) countries like Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Austria will probably not have even one auto factory. Places like UK would slim down from ~6 to 1 if they are lucky. Places like Canada would slim down from ~12 to 3. Winner-takes-all consequences will result in severe balance-of-payments stresses for losers. If you cast your mind back to the run-in to WW1 beggar-my-neighbour economic policies were one of the big stressors in the system. Such stressors will return in spades.
The same issue takes place at a personal human level as the new factories are becoming increasingly productive in terms of employees/car/year. So overall far fewer factories employing fewer people.
Economic inequalities naturally increase both between and within countries in such a scenario.
There will be a heck of a lot of stresses in that.