Gobsmacked: Radical roadmap to car revolution
The change from petrol to electric transportation will be surprisingly fast, an expert believes. Tom Pullar-Strecker reports.
The Francie. the tragic sinking one year ago.
‘‘We’ve got a very good last point because we know where skipper Bill McNatty used to put his bar crossing report in both going out and coming back. Francie’s The corned beef sandwiches with them instead. The accident came without warning, they told her. A ‘‘rogue wave’’, taller and more ferocious than anything they’d seen before hurled everyone off the ship.
Yerro and her mother went to the police station after news reports of The Francie trickled in, expecting to find Afamasaga wet but in good spirits.
‘‘I’ll always remember my Mum’s face when I turned back to her and I nodded my head that he wasn’t there. She passed out, it was as if the life had come out completely from her, there was nothing there.’’
The disaster had made several charter owners ‘‘hesitant’’ in the months following the disaster, Kaipara Cruising and Sports Fishing Club commodore Steve McGregor said.
‘‘I don’t even bother going out the bar because there’s enough fishing in the harbour. Why the hell go all the way out there?’’ NO petrol vehicles will be built after 2025 and the number of cars in the United States will have plummeted by 80 per cent five years later, with most journeys taken ‘‘Uber-style’’ in fleets of selfdriving cars.
That was the message given to APEC delegates in Wellington by Stanford economist Tony Seba, who believes the transport and power industries are just a few years away from a massive tipping point.
Energy Minister Megan Woods described his predictions as ‘‘both interesting and challenging’’.
Associate Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter said she would be discussing options to promote the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) with officials over the next few weeks.
‘‘This Government is committed to reducing climate pollution to net zero by 2050. That means we have a responsibility to start reducing emissions from transport,’’ she said.
Seba agreed that there was no need for governments to consider subsidising EVs if his forecasts were correct, as they would take over rapidly anyway.
Instead, the most useful thing policy-makers could do was to encourage pilots of driverless vehicles, he said.
Seba said councils should also be preparing for huge areas of major cities to be freed-up by a reduced need for parking.
On current trends it would be cheaper to build a mid-range EV costing US$33,000 than a conventional car by 2019, and they would be cheaper than the average equivalent conventional small car by 2022, he said.
Given EVs were 10 times cheaper to fuel and much cheaper to maintain, petrol and diesel cars would soon be difficult to give away, he believed.
While the average car had more than 2000 moving parts, EVs had just 18 and could rack up 500,000 miles.
By 2030, 95 per cent of passenger-miles would taken in self-driving vehicles, he said. In the US ‘‘200 million cars are going to be stranded – useless’’.
Motor Trade Association industry relationships manager Greig Epps said he came away from the presentation ‘‘a bit gobsmacked’’.
Epps forecast in 2016 that it would be 20 years before EVs had a significant impact in New Zealand, but now believed that could happen within 10 to 15 years.
Seba’s forecasts are predicated on the assumption that the cost of generating and storing solar electricity will continue to fall – to the point where just about all generation will be solar by 2030.
But electricity production would only have to increase by 18 per cent in the US to cope with a complete switch to EVs, he said.
Not all experts believe EVs or solar power will take over quite as quickly as Seba suggests.
The number of EVs on New Zealand roads has risen to 5431, but that still represents only a little over a tenth of one per cent of all vehicles.
And the International Energy Agency has set a much more modest goal of ensuring 30 per cent of cars, buses and trucks were EVs or hybrids by 2030.
Seba agreed other forecasters had come to less radical conclusions.
‘‘Mainstream analysts look at one another instead of looking at the data,’’ he said.
But, for example, business consultant McKinsey had advised telecommunications giant AT&T in 1980 that there would be fewer than a million cellphones in the US by 2000 when, in fact, the actual number was 109 million, he said.
‘‘In 13 years, New York City went from all horses to all cars.’’
In 13 years, New York City went from all horses to all cars.’ TONY SEBA