OUR FUTURE WILL BE ELECTRIC
There is much talk about what is called “radical economic transformation” in our country right now. What-ever that might or not mean, what is almost certain is that the entire world is going to experience really radical change in the motor industry within a decade.
Oil prices will collapse and the petroleum industry as we know it will die. Professor Tony Seba of Stanford University has predicted neither petrol or diesel cars nor any other form of transport using fossil fuels will be sold within eight years.
He has predicted that within this time-span people all over the world will stop driving altogether. They will have switched to self-drive electric vehicles that will be at least ten times cheaper to run than fossil-based cars with a life span of an incredible 1,6 million kilometres.
He has pointed out that there will be very few fuel stations all over the world: spares will be difficult to find, the more so since
there will be few people able to fix any of the over 2 000 moving parts conventional cars. Mountains of fossil fuel based cars will be everywhere and cities will ban humans from driving cars. It goes without saying that the entire oil industry will be facing death and car manufacturers as we know them will have nothing to do. Seba has said:
“We are on the cusp of one of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruptions of transport in history”.
He has forecast that the "tipping point” will be with us within the next two to three years. Electric cars will by then have a range of over 320 kms. “By 2025 anything that moves on wheels will be electric globally,” Seba says.
Seba has pointed out that that electric cars are four times more efficient than diesel and petrol cars, which, he says lose 80% of their power in heat.
In India the Prime Minister has said that his country will phase out all petrol and diesel cars by 2032 and European countries have much shorter time frames for banning fossilbased motor vehicles.
Against this background it is not difficult to see how South Africa will have to go through dramatic change within the next decade. The entire motor industry as we know it will all but disappear. And there will be no export of cars from our country.