How long will car dealerships survive? How long will big oil dominate this economy and this world?
I don’t pretend to know. I do know that as I look around, nearly all vehicles in sight are powered by an internal combustion engine.
My wife and I test-drove an electric car recently. We liked it a lot, but in the end decided range was too big an issue. That won’t be the case for long.
I recently read an article by scientist and inventor Seth Miller where he claimed that Keystone XL will be the world’s last great fossil fuel project. He believes it will never pay back its cost and will close not long into its 40-year lifespan. He said something I’d never heard before. A conventional vehicle, like the ones most of us drive, has 2,000 moving parts. An electric vehicle has 20.
Think of the implication that has on car dealers and automotive repair shops.
Mr. Miller believes change will come more rapidly than most of us have thought. Think what computers have done to our lives. Thirty years ago, cell phones were the size of bricks and now they replace most people’s conventional phones. We went from records to eight tracks to CDs to live streaming music systems in what seems a nanosecond.
So when you start to see more and more electric cars and the range starts to climb to where you can do the kind of driving you expect from your old internal combustion engine, you wonder how long fossil fuel resources are going to be needed to the extent they are now.
Here in B.C., the Kinder Morgan pipeline has been a huge political issue. My view has long been that Kinder Morgan or not, a way must be found to get our resources to world markets. My preferred choice would be to have the oil refined in Canada and shipped to international markets in the safest, most secure way possible.
The question Mr. Miller raises is how much longer are we going to need or want the oil that is presently in the ground? In my view that decision will be made by investors deciding whether or not to invest in fossil fuel production and transportation.
Here’s another interesting idea. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration in the U.S. estimates the cars we have traditionally bought are good for an average of 240,000 kilometres. An electric vehicle is expected to last 804,000 kilometres.
That means a lot fewer cars for those dealers to sell and the costs keep coming down.
The other factor is the retail model. I still go to stores to buy most things. My 30-something son buys almost everything online. His middle name should be Amazon.
Tesla broke the mould with their online ordering and small retail shops instead of dealerships. Most of us still want to test-drive a car or truck – touch it, feel it, maybe try out two or three kinds of vehicles. But tomorrow’s buyer may well trust online tests and reviews and be willing to pay online and pick up the car or have it delivered.
One thing we’ve learned in this lifetime is almost nothing stays the same.
