This is a good bit of insight as to what things will be like...
SOON.
I just watched this presentation. I recommend that anyone who believes that EV's are not the future needs to watch the video and then get back to us.
The disruption aspect is really the most amazing part of it. The presenter shows the trends for: PV cost of electricity over time, battery storage increase over time, semiconductor density over time, and then things like the Model S has 18 moving parts (seems hard to believe) versus an ICE's 2000.
alseTrick's thought that "
A $20k EV with 350 mile range that refuels in <10 minutes...that's the event horizon. That is the Model T/assembly line. Until then, vehicles like the 3 or Y or whatever are just important next steps leading up to that moment."
While few would question that Tesla actually producing 500,000 Model 3's per year would be a
very important step (to use alseTricks's words), it misses the OP's original question I believe. The OP's original question was: "
Do you think that the world will be different after the Model 3 is released or it won't be much different?".
I believe there are two answers to that question:
Answer #1: The first answer is that if Tesla produces 200,000+ Model 3's in 2018,
the world will not be much different. EV sales that year in the U.S. might total 400,000 or so, out of 17,000,000 sales, so only about 2.5%. In that sense, the world will not be much different, because 97% of the cars being sold are still ICE's.
Answer #2: The second answer is that if Tesla produces 200,000+ Model 3's in 2018,
the world will most definitely be much different. What is going to be different is that because of the S curve of technology adoption, it will be absolutely certain, beyond the shadow of a doubt that exists today, that mass market EV's are going to completely displace ICE vehicles within a very short time. Very short. The presenter in the video states that all vehicles produced in 2025 will be electric vehicles. It's all about understanding that the S curve is going to kick in.
In the Tesla investing world, and other disrupting technologies (Netflix, Amazon, etc.), there is a similar analogy to grasping the idea. Back when 1mbps DSL lines were the best game in town, Amazon introduces streaming video in addition to mailed DVD's. General consensus was that it was crazy, since the network could never handle the bandwidth needed to stream video to everyone at an acceptable quality. AMZN stock is up 10x since 2009.
Back in 2012 when the Model S debuted, Fiskar had just stopped production due to A123 bankruptcy, and the Volt was outselling the Leaf by 3-1. General consensus was that Tesla was crazy to think that an EV that cost 2x-3x as much as the Leaf would sell anywhere near what Tesla was projecting. This was even after Car and Driver named the Model S the car of the year. Elon was the only one building cars who actually understood that if you build a compelling enough EV, you can demand a premium price, and make money selling it. He even told everyone in advance that that was exactly what he was planning on doing. Anyone who saw that the S curve was coming made a nice 10x on their TSLA bet over 4 years.
It's all about seeing where things are going to go, and how fast we are going to get there. If your investing plan is to wait until it's absolutely clear that something is going to happen, you are never going to reap the benefits of those who jumped on the S curve right when it started happening.
The Sage linked video shows a New York street in 1900. There are 100 horses and 1 car. The same street in 1913 had 100 cars and 1 horse. Thats whats going to happen.
RT
