This is what I see. Whereas we salivated over the Vettes and Ferraris, the kids nowadays salivate over Teslas. They are a technology centric generation and the Tesla, to them, is a giant iPhone on wheels. They live with plugging in their devices daily, to being always connected. The old mechanical nature of the ICE is as anachronistic to them as the rotary dial phone and rotary changer TV, were to my generation growing up in the early 80s. It's a device from a prior era, that's still hanging around but clearly on it's deathbed. The Tesla fits their new paradigm to a T.
There is a very real risk that the ICE market collapses far quicker than anybody imagines. And the further risk is that a bunch of Chinese manufacturers step in to fill the gap left by the legacy makers. We should all be very concerned.
I remember when CDs came on the scene in the late 80s and early 90s. Initially CDs were the more expensive exotic, but it seemed almost overnight that vinyl was gone. My old turntable was dying and I wanted something to play my old vinyl so I tried to buy a turntable before they were gone and it was like the selection went from hundreds of options to 3 overnight. Now there are specialty albums produced on vinyl and it still has a following among audiophiles and DJs who do the scratching type of dance stuff in clubs require vinyl, but even CDs are dying out.
There is usually a market that remains for obsolete tech for one reason or another. Horses became more of a hobby than a necessity when cars became the norm, but for some ranching tasks, horses are still necessary and they are used for some work where motorized vehicles are not suitable. There is also a massive horse hobby industry with lots of competitions for horses as well as a lot of recreational riding.
Steam locomotives were almost all retired in the 1950s because economically diesels were much more feasible. However some steam locomotives are kept in running condition for recreation train rides and when larger steam locomotives go out on the rails, rail fans crowd the tracks to see them go by.
My father has been a rail fan his whole life and when I was in college we went to see the old SP locomotive 4449 go through the Tehachapi Loop. I didn't appreciate the attraction of steam engines until that day. As the engine went by pulling the grade the ground shook in a very unique way and there was something primal about it.
I never got the thrill some people get from sports car engines, but if I hear an old inline or radial aircraft engine my eyes will be glued to the sky. My father (who also was into aircraft) taught me how to recognize the some engines by sound. He's always been much better at recognizing the engines by sound. Again there is a thrill to hearing a Merlin V-12 with the throttle open that you're never going to get with a general aviation plane, or even a modern airliner.
ICE cars will remain as a type of hobby vehicle and there are some things that ICE will probably be better at for many years to come. If you need a vehicle to do 1000 miles without any facilities, an ICE is going to be the only way to go for some years to come. Few ICE have fuel tanks that will get them more than 400 miles, but its usually easy to carry extra fuel on board to extend your range.
An EV could cross the Australian Outback or remote regions of North America with some solar panels carried on board, but the vehicle is going to be stopped for days at a time recharging. You're likely to run out of food before making it.
Seeing people get the "ah hah" about electrics as I talk them up and show them my car as well as my own experience learning about them, I suspect the switch in attitude between ICE and EV will be very quick once Model 3s get out there in large numbers. A recent poll of Americans indicated that something like 65% of Americans know very little about EVs and less than 20% have ever been in one.
The time between when the public switches its attitudes about EVs and car companies produce enough to meet demand is going to be a decade or more. Switching from vinyl to CDs was a fairly easy thing to do. It probably took a week or two to change vinyl pressing plants over to CD production. EVs face the problem that we need 100 more Gigafactories to replace all the ICE built and building that capacity is going to take around $1 trillion. Nobody has the money to do that quickly, even if the will is there.
Changing over small tech is fairly easy, but the larger the tech, the more difficult it is to switch. Switching from horses to cars was a much simpler problem than switching all car production to EVs, the tech involved in early cars was much simpler and there were a lot fewer horses to replace (the population of the entire world and especially the developed world was much smaller) and that still took from the 1890s to the 1930s. Right now we're right about at that elbow in demand that happened around 1915 when the Model T was introduced. It still took nearly 2 more decades to replace all the horses (my father remembers horse drawn delivery and service vehicles when he was a kid).
The Chinese may try to move into overseas markets, but few, if any, of their cars can pass the safety standards in developed countries and they have a massive internal demand for cars. It's going to be a while before Chinese car makers are going to have the excess capacity to seriously need external markets. Some like BYD are thinking long term and probing foreign markets, but the bulk of their production is sold domestically and likely will for another decade.
Chinese home grown batteries are very poor quality compared to those made in the rest of the world. They can improve the tech, but their batteries will then cost the same as everyone else's. As I've pointed out before, making high quality li-ion batteries is very capital intensive, not labor intensive, so the Chinese advantage in manufacturing costs is nullified.
Chinese cars introduced into developed country car markets are trying to compete in a completely different arena than they have at home. Chinese is mechanizing now, the competition for new cars is bicycles and scooters. In that market with a huge social bonus for having a car, any car, you can produce any crappy car and people will buy it.
In developed countries the market is very different. Cars have improved in quality dramatically over the last 30 years to a point where there are a lot of perfectly serviceable 20 year old cars on the road. The market is saturated and new cars compete with older cars. A new BYD fill-in-the-blank is not competing with the other new cars on the market, it's also competing with the last 20 years of used cars. Buyers are asking the question, should I buy this EV with a bad reliability record compared to other cars with poor features compared to other cars? Or should I buy a 10 year old Honda and save my money for what I really want?
A lot of people are going to put up with the old ICE a bit longer to get what they want.
Car companies will have a tough time selling new ICE, but the used ICE market will keep going as people wait for decent EVs rather than just get any EV. Other people will lease a new car rather than buy so they can get rid of it in a few years when they get the EV they want.
