That is what I mean. The "saving money by not buying petrol and generating your own electricity" will work in the short term, but somewhere along the line a new tax or a raise in taxes will come to compensate for the loss in tax revenue for vehicle and fuel tax.

We probably won’t be owning cars like we do now in 2040 anyway. Put the whole automated thing to one side, the idea of car ownership is starting to be eroded. You can buy a car on a monthly rental. At the end of the rental period, you just swap for a new one (or pay a large lump to call it yours). This is much like a mobile phone - cars being seen almost as disposable by the initial owners. Those returned after the rental scheme runs out will be refurbished and resold. The manufacturer basically gets two incomes form one vehicle.

Automated cars will further erode the ownership model. Your car spends most of its life sitting around doing nothing. You’re paying tax, insurance, even fuel leakage (petrol slowly evaporating, batteries slowly discharging). Why not just pay for the car when you use it? I expect we’ll see more of “cars as a service” rather than “cars as a possession” by the time 2040 rolls along. You want a car? Just order one - it turns up, takes you where you want, and clears off to the next person who needs it.

Exactly, and I think, with automated cars, you won't even do that, it will be all charged "per ride", with the vehicles turning up when you need them.

For a quite a few years now, I've felt the future of transportation will be more akin to a taxi, except entirely automated. You need to get to work? Press a button, or tap a screen (or even have an alarm clock type feature), and a vehicle arrives at your door. No human driver. It takes you to your destination(s) and then heads off. You eother PAYG or pay monthly subscription fee. You can select a different vehicle depending on your need. More vehicles will be 1- or 2- seater because they'll be cheaper and need less roadspace. The vehicle will be entirely electric. As all cars will be the same - no need for traffic lights etc - commuting will be faster. No idiot humans on the road.

IIRC, it was Jay Leno who said people will keep cars for recreation in the same way they keep horses now. Ever since, thatyhow I've felt the future will be.

I've always kind of assumed at some point all day to day cars would be automated and that if you wanted to actually drive a car you'd have to go to a designated racing venue to do so, even if you weren't racing anybody else..

That is how I have envisaged it, ever since the late 80s or so. Each time I've bought a new car, I've always said it will be my last...

They are really breaking down on Diesel here. Stuttgart is looking to ban all diesel vehicles / all German diesels / all non-Euro 6 diesels (depending on which news agency you listen to). The Cayenne is still banned and the German manufacturers will have to provide another round of software updates to reduce emissions further.

Many big towns and cities are looking at Stuttgart to see how that will play out - Germany has a big problem with NOx emmissions and many large cities fail to keep within their allotments.

Interestingly the talk is only about German diesels... My Nissan (with a 1.5L Renault power plant) hasn't been affected yet and is Euro 6, without AdBlue, so it will be interesting to see how this pans out of my vehicle. Will it get caught up in the scandal? Will they now introduce Euro 6 stickers for newer cars (at the moment Euro 4 and better gets an E4 sticker, which lets it drive in cities, older cars with Euro 1 - 3 classification can't drive in most cities as it is, if the rules are implemented, then I can see only E6 cars being let into cities, or a complete diesel ban in cities).

Sometimes, I think that the current car will be the last internal combustion engine car I buy. Then I remember that what I’d like to follow on this one is a Morris Traveller. By the time we get to the 2040 date, I’ll be approaching 80, so I expect that either I won’t be driving myself around much any more, or if I do, it will be in something much smaller. Possibly by then, I may be taking on the idea of “cars as a service” as a good idea.

Or I’ll be dead. There is that, of course.

same

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jntsT0BdxDw

How much Crude Oil is left?

The correct answer to that is 'nobody knows, and it's possibly irrelevant question anyway'. There are a number of variables at work here

1) The demand for oil based products vs the demand for 'next generation' products is variable. We're not just talking about ICE vs EV, we're talking about the gamut of 'petrochemical products' - will we still need oil to make things out of plastic for example? There are many research initiatives to make plastics by other means..
2) The demand for oil (obviously) affects the price of oil but that's also affected by the likes of OPEC moderating the rate at which they dig it out of the ground, which is a pretty.. arbitrary decision
3) The price of oil affects the viability of pulling oil out of the ground in any given situation - in the same say the high price of gas made fracking research economically advantageous.

If the price of oil goes up, finding more oil (or recovering oil from places it was too hard to before) becomes worthwhile, so suddenly you have more oil than you previously thought you did. However the price of oil is not 'free to float' - the large oil producers like to keep the price inside a given floor and ceiling.

Several of these factors are arbitrary, some of them are impossible to predict and some of them are essentially chaotic as a change at the micro scale has can have major effects eventually at the macro scale. Anybody who can accurately predict this stuff with any accuracy... well, they wouldn't need to be be making a living as motoring journalist doing youtube videos, let's put it that way.

Eventually, yes, at some theoretical point we would reach the stage where all the oil that it is technologically feasible to recover could have been recovered. However at the rate certain things are happening, it is actually possible we'll have moved on from being a petrochemical based culture before that happens. As the major developed world moves away from fossil fuel power generation and from ICEs to EVs - because those things are going to happen, make no mistake - the demand for oil might top out and even start to drop off. And what happens in New York tomorrow happens in Nairobi as well eventually. IN fact sometimes it happens before - I'd say solar micro-power generation for example makes more sense near the equator than it does in say Scandinavia. We may never actually dig up the last barrel of oil, as by that point we may well not need to.

Anyway, where's Lev when you need him .

That is pretty much the argument of the video. We need the oil for other things, so making petrol engines more economical, like the new Mazda HCCI technology is something that we might as well do (basically John had made a video explaining the new HCCI technology and a lot of people answered that it was a waste of time and money, as "everybody" is moving to EV).

If we need to process the oil for other things, why not use the petrol byproduct in the most economical way possible? EV has a loooong way to go before it is anywhere near as economical as petrol or diesel - batteries just cannot begin to achieve the energy to mass ratios of petrol and diesel at the current time. In his case, Australia, where most electricity comes from coal, moving to EVs is also not very environmentally friendly. In Germany, where a lot of electricity is made from renewables and (for the next couple of years) nuclear, the equation works more in favour of EVs from an environmental point of view, but they still aren't really an alternative at the current time for many.

perfect example - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-40527784

That's just the start. Australia has a vast unused land area where there is plenty of sunlight and little rainfall. It's an ideal environment for solar. What needs to come is the storage technology to smooth out the generation cycle at the scale required. That's going to be here.. maybe in the next 10 years, I'd estimate.

If ten years from now someone came to you and said 'OK, give me 1000 euros now and you'll have free electricity for the next ten years, or you can keep paying 50 euros a month for electricity generated using coal if you like', would you take that deal or not, because that's what we're talking about.

Frankly, if Australia is still using coal to generate more than fraction of it's electricity 20 years from now, there's been a massive failure in government there.

More than we need I expect. The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stone, it ended because we found something better. I suspect that will be true for our energy needs too. Other forms of power will become cheaper to the point were a lot of oil is no longer cost effective to extract. It will still be there, it just won't be worth getting.

It isn't just fuel. What about all of the other things that we need oil for, like plastic?

That was the main argument for the continued development of more efficient petrol engines - we need the oil for other things anyway and a by-product of producing them is petrol, so why not use it?