Tesla Model 3 - the birth of the next era of ground transportation
Over the last several years, a lot of people have been excited about electric cars, and rightly so. They represent nothing less than a revolution in transportation. Cleaner, far more efficient, and with much lower maintenance, they represent a big evolutionary step in auto manufacturing. But that’s nothing compared to the next step = the ability for a car to drive itself, which I will call autodrive from here on out. After that’s rolled out, the way we think of and use cars will radically change.
Consider the economics of owning a car. This breaks down into three basic categories. Capital Costs, Maintenance, and Fuel.
Capital Costs
This is the cost of buying the car. This is the upfront cost of purchasing a car. To figure out your cost per mile, you take the cost of the car and divide it by it’s functional lifetime — 150,000 to 200,000 miles for most cars. So if we buy a car for $25,000 and drive it until it breaks at 250,000 miles, that’s a cost of $.10 per mile.
An electric car, on the other hand, will last far, far longer. MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) on many electric motors is 50,000 hours. This is the equivalent of 3,000,000 miles of travel at highway speeds, or 200 years of average use. You could literally be given a car at birth, drive it your whole life, and then give it to a descendant with more than half it’s functional lifetime still intact. If we take our previous example of a $25,000 car, we get a capitalize cost of $.008, or less than a penny a mile.
Maintenance
This is the stuff that regularly wears out on a car. Oil changes, filters, brakes, lube, etc. Oil changes being the most common at 3,000 miles. I won’t get into the math here, as it varies wildly per car (go look up the cost of tires for a Corvette vs a Corolla).
Electric cars cut that maintenance down to brakes, lube and tires. You can realistically go years between needing any maintenance at all.
Fuel
This is the gasoline, diesel, cng, electrons, or whatever else your car runs on. (Cars than ran on steam power used to be a thing. Seriously. Google it, it’s kinda cool.)
ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) cars run in gasoline, diesel or some other liquid fuel. At 25mpg, and fuel prices at $2.50, that’s $.10c per mile. There are plenty of vehicles that get better or worse than that, but 25 is around the average.
Electric cars get mpg-e or the electric equivalent. A better method of calculating it would be miles per kilowatt-hour. The current efficiency champ, the Chevy Bolt, gets about 4 miles per kw/h (EPA rating). At $.125c per kw/h, that works out to $.025 per mile, or 1/4 the cost of the average gas.
Putting it all together — and adding autodrive
So we have a car that can potentially go a million miles or more, needs very little maintenance, and is dirt cheap to drive, but owning a car for decades isn’t something that many people are interested in. Especially these days, cars go obsolete fast. Compare the dashboard of even a 5 year old car to a brand new one of the same make and you will see some radical changes. 10 years ago, an aux port for playing tunes from your Zune or iPod was a pretty forward thinking idea. Now, if you don’t see an aux port, bluetooth capability, plus application linking from Google, Android, AND Apple, you’re behinds the times.
Who can take advantage of electric car longevity, and still use up the car before it’s horribly obsolete? Taxi cabs. Averaging around 70,000 miles per year (NYC Taxi numbers) cabs put considerably more wear and tear on a car than any individual can. What’s the most expensive part of the cab? The driver, which accounts for about 1/3 the total cost of running a cab.
This is where autodrive coupled with electric vehicles is really going to change things.
If you look at all the averages, for a dead average car, the cost of ownership is about $.40 per mile, all told. About 15% of people already use Uber, and that’s just out of convenience. It’s more expensive to take Uber than it is to drive yourself on a per mile basis.
Now imagine an Uber-like service, without drivers, using autonomous cars, that only costs $.15 per mile. It can be summoned anywhere at any time, always takes the best path, and never gets into accidents. Not only would this make owning a car an exercise in vanity, it makes transportation much more accessible to the poor.
However, this revolution comes with a cost, and it’s a big one.
Hundreds of thousands of transportation jobs will be lost. This is not hyperbole. It will start with taxi drivers, and eventually buses and trucks will be automated.
Then will come the oil price crash. If you replace all the gas cars with electric, that’s about 25% of the oil consumption right there. The coal industry is currently collapsing due to a similar 25% drop in demand. So Big Oil will collapse the same way Kodak did once the digital camera was invented. And like Kodak, Big Oil thinks it will take decades to make the transition. Kodak went from titan to bankrupt in 7 years. Why? Because they had been around for 80 years, and didn’t anticipate the rapid advance or adoption of digital picture tech.
Next will be the collapse of the car industry. Most will convert over to making autodrive cars of various shapes and sizes. But with cars being shared, and few people buying personal cars, the manufacturer-to-consumer pipeline, and everyone in it, will be out of work. The dealer network will be drastically reduced, the economy car will pretty much vanish, and cars will become symbols of status rather than necessary conveyances.
Insurance industry jobs will also be shed, and premiums will plummet. Who needs insurance on a car that never gets into an accident? The job of insurance adjuster will all but cease to exist, as accidents will be exceedingly rare.
Police jobs will also suffer, or at the very least, transform. It’s hard to give tickets out if the traffic is a steady stream of autodrive cars all going the same speed. Who even needs speed limits when the cars can be governed to whatever speed the locals think appropriate? All it will take is a single instance of a cop giving a ticket to an autodrive car that conflicts with the internal log and it’s all over for speed traps. Same for reckless driving and all other vehicle related offenses. “traffic cop” will become as anachronistic as “phone operator”.
At the end of the day, I welcome technological change, especially change that saves lives and makes people safer, and autodrive will undoubtedly do just that.
But what are we to do with the hundreds of thousands of people who will lose their jobs when it happens? This type of technology only destroys jobs, it doesn’t really create new ones.
I hope no one reading this was looking forward to a long career in trucking or bus driving.
