Things are changing faster than one can imagine! Most of what was predicted by Alwin Toffler in ‘Future Shock’ and Noah Harari’s ‘21 lessens for the 21st century’ could even be overwhelmed!
Take for example, the automobile industry: Electric cars will become mainstream by about 2030. Smart major auto manufacturers have already earmarked money to start building new plants that only build electric cars. Most traditional car companies will doubtless become bankrupt. They will try the evolutionary approach and just build a better car, while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will do the revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels. Look at what Volvo is doing right now; no more internal combustion engines in their vehicles starting with 2019 models, using all electric or hybrid only, with the intent of phasing out hybrid models. Many engineers from Volkswagen and Audi are completely terrified of Tesla and they should be. Look at all these auto majors are already offering electric vehicles. That was unheard of only a few years ago.
Auto repair shops will disappear. A petrol/diesel engine has 20,000 individual parts while an electrical motor has just 20. Electric cars are sold with lifetime guarantees and are only repaired by dealers. It takes only 10 minutes to remove and replace an electric motor. Faulty electric motors are not repaired in the dealership but are sent to a regional repair shop that repairs them with robots. Your electric motor malfunction light goes on, so you drive up to what looks like a car wash, and your car is towed through while you have a cup of coffee and out comes your car with a new electric motor!
Petrol pumps will soon go away. Street corners will have meters that dispense electricity. Companies will install electrical recharging stations; in fact, they’ve already started in the developed world.
Only in 2018 the first self-driving cars appeared. In the next 2 years, the entire industry got disrupted. You won’t want to own a car anymore as you will call a car with your phone, it will show up at your location and drive you to your destination.
The very young children of today will never get a driver’s license and will never own a car. This will change our cities, because we will need 90-95% fewer cars. We can transform former parking spaces into green parks.
About 1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide including distracted or drunk driving. We now have one accident every 60,000 miles; with autonomous driving that will drop to 1 accident in 6 million miles. That will save a million lives plus worldwide each year. Insurance companies will have massive trouble because, without accidents, the costs will become cheaper. Their car insurance business model will disappear.
Cities will be less noisy because all new cars will run on electricity. Cities will have much cleaner air as well. Since automobile industry is the energy guzzler, there would be sea change in the energy industry:
Electricity will soon become incredibly cheap and clean. Solar production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years, but you can now see the burgeoning impact. And it’s just getting ramped up. Homes will produce and store more electrical energy during the day and then they use and will sell it back to the grid. The grid stores it and dispenses it to industries that are high electricity users. Has anybody seen the Tesla roof? Fossil energy companies are desperately trying to limit access to the grid to prevent competition from home solar installations, but that simply cannot continue – technology will take care of that strategy.
Coal industries will go away. Gasoline/oil companies will go away. Drilling for oil will stop. They may have to survive on petrochemical industries. So OPEC can’t dictate terms. The middle-east is in trouble.
Children born today would be surprised to know the present ‘chaotic world’ when they grow up – Energy and automobile sector is just one of them. There are many more to come in the health and entertainment industries. Welcome to Tomorrow.
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