The end of petrol cars could be just eight years away

No more petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks will be sold anywhere in the world within eight years. The entire market for land transport will switch to electrification, leading to a collapse of oil prices and the demise of the petroleum industry as we have known it for a century.

Waymo is Google's self-driving car project. 

This is the futuristic forecast by Stanford University economist Tony Seba . His report, with the deceptively bland title Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030, has gone viral in green circles and is causing spasms of anxiety in the established industries.

Seba's premise is that people will stop driving altogether. We will switch en masse to self-drive electric vehicles (EVs) that are 10 times cheaper to run than fossil-based cars, with a near-zero marginal cost of fuel.

Only nostalgics will cling to the old habit of car ownership. The rest will adapt to vehicles on demand. It will become harder to find a petrol station, spares, or anybody to fix the 2000 moving parts that bedevil the internal combustion engine.

Read Ambrose Evan-Pritchard’s comment in today’s Melbourne’s Age - “The end of petrol cars could be just eight years away.”