Originally Posted by
Super_Geo
I think this will be the last years of the ICE epoch.
Automation is just arriving-- Waymo has launched live autonomous taxi trials in Arizona (albeit on a very small scale) where you don't need to be a beta tester that signed an NDA to use the service. We will start seeing companies start to scale in 2020. Lyft shares have gotten decimated since their $88 high water mark on the first day of trading, but I think people are overlooking the fact that they announced a Waymo partnership in their quarterly report. Getting autonomous taxis on the road takes huge capital up front, but investors are happily piling cash in and the Lyft/Waymo partnership shows that would-be competitors in the space are happy to team up because the addressable market is truly enormous.
Autonomous taxis are projected to decrease the cost of rides by 80%, but I think that will take 5-10 years to hit that price point. By that point owning a car will not make economic sense for larger and larger portions of society. I'm sure that Beyond is an outlier demographic wise, but for most people if they can get form downtown to the suburbs for $6-8 instead of $30-40, why deal with parking, gas/power, maintenance, insurance, depreciation, etc.
That's before we even get to ICE vs EV. With how many miles these autonomous taxis will clock, and how easy it will be to have them drive themselves to charging hubs, large fleets of EVs will make much more sense on a life cycle cost basis. We haven't even explored how much energy can be saved by having autonomous cars drafting/regen-braking in tandem/etc because the space is so new still.
I love driving, but it's going the way of horse back riding... soon it'll be a hobby for the wealthy. Middle/lower class kids born now will likely never push a gas pedal in their life time.