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I think the genie is out of the bottle with regards to electric cars. They've proven they work and can compete with internal combustion cars on most metrics tha
by drcross 10y ago
I think the genie is out of the bottle with regards to electric cars. They've proven they work and can compete with internal combustion cars on most metrics that people care about and exceed ICEs in a number of ways. Battery capacity generally increases 8% per year, and battery production is ramping up in ways never seen before. The mindshare has already left Gas cars, it's just a matter of time before sales slip to electric, a bit like Nokia compared to the smartphone, Nokia were still shipping millions of units but consumer demand was waiting for cheaper smartphone units, once it did Nokia was destroyed.
- wyldfire 10y agoBy the time electric cars are ready for ubiquity, transportation-as-a-utility will have exploded thanks to autonomous vehicles. Why buy an electric car with less maintenance than a gas one when you can just skip out on owning a car entirely? Governments and/or insurance can directly or indirectly subsidize this move for the sake of safety.
- blahi 10y agoWhy would insurance companies do this? They stand to lose a TON by autonomous vehicles. Estimates are in the 60 to 80% of the market to go away.
- botty_throwaway 10y agoRisk versus technological change is a dynamical system, yet many of the sky-is-falling estimates for the insurance industry myopically forecast assuming an invariant risk set-point. For an alternate perspective of a potential (lucrative) future for insurance, see my post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12245312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12245312
- blahi 10y agoI see but what happens if the parameters of the transportation systems are regulated?
- drcross 10y agoI disagree with you, OP mentions 60% reduction in the civilian insurance market and there's studies to back that up- http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2015/10/23/385779.htm http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2015/10/23/385... Any large scale car accidents will be re-simulated, analysed and scoured until they are fixed, the general public will not permit them to persist. This means a complete collapse of the entire industry except for enterprise scale underwriting of the car manufacturers which they may already have for recalls.