| | | The popular public myth regarding the downstream oil business, is that oil companies are evil monsters robbing the poor citizenry blind with ill-gotten gains in brutal monopoly. But I spent a decade and half doing battle designing and selling the range from bitumen and Orimulsion to LPG and CNG including lubricants, methanol, ethanol, and other alternative fuels, and 3 decades observing shareholder returns, though I refrained from buying shares until a big blunder a year ago because shareholder returns were pretty average and nothing like that available from the likes of Qualcomm and now Apple, Tesla, Microsoft and the many umpty$trillion Cyberspace businesses.
The car industry is a bit like the oil industry in that both are mature industries and incremental, with not much in the way of exponential leaps. Competition is harsh, brutal and fatal.
That applies to electric cars too, with batteries being very old technology with incremental gains over the last 100 years. Now that $billions of batteries are involved, progress will probably accelerate but like electric motors which have been developing since the 19th century, the easy gains have been made.
The real race is not electric cars, but autonomous cars. That's an umpty$trillion vastness because that will make uberized autonomous cars able to replace personal ownership of cars. 90% of cars would be redundant. Even at peak times, only 10% of cars are on the move simultaneously. We have 3 cars that won't be needed when autonomous taxis are available. We own cars because it's the cheapest most convenient way to get around. When it's cheaper to get in a taxi that's immediately available right where I want it, I won't want to pay more for the hassles of my own car [capital cost, depreciation, garaging, parking, maintenance costs and hassles, insurance].
If Tesla can get there first and get half the market, the sky's the limit on the share price. But they are far from that. It's not as though others aren't also doing it. Tesla might be like Nokia = had a huge mobile Cyberspace lead but faded to oblivion with Apple and Huawei coming from nowhere to rule the world, along with Samsung.
Plenty of people are trying to develop autonomous cars.
Maybe autonomous cars will be supervised by remote pilots who take the controls when the car finds things confusing. The pilot could use a joystick to move the car using 3D cameras with low latency high data rate Qualcomm data transfer. Once past the difficulty, pass control back to the car. 10 pilots could manage perhaps 1,000 cars or even 10,000 when the autopilots are good enough.
Battery day looked a bit of a fizzer to me, as expected.
Mqurice |
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