Why It Won’t Make Sense to Buy a Gasoline-Powered Car by 2025
This post contains affiliate links, which means we may receive a commission, at no cost to you, if you make a purchase through a link.
The automobile hasn’t changed much in about 100 years. Sure, we’ve made them a little more efficient, we’ve added things like air-conditioning, power-steering, airbags, seatbelts, power windows, and automatic transmissions, but essentially the basic concept of a gasoline engine sitting on a drivetrain with 4 wheels hasn’t changed since about the 1920’s.
But it’s about to.
The Electric Vehicle (EV), or electric car, continues to drop in price and will soon be very competitive with gasoline-powered cars, and because of that, the gasoline-powered car is facing severe industry-level disruption from the electric car market. According to Tony Seba, in his book Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation: How Silicon Valley Will Make Oil, Nuclear, Natural Gas, Coal, Electric Utilities and Conventional Cars Obsolete by 2030, he explains why, and lists 9 reasons why the gas-powered automobile will be disrupted by electric cars. Today, I wanted to briefly go over them. If you want to know more, I highly recommend you buy up a copy of his book.
9 Reasons Why Gas-Powered Automobiles Will Be Disrupted By Electric Cars
1. The Electric Motor is 5 Times More Energy Efficient
Gasoline is a very energy-dense fuel. However, due to energy losses in converting that gasoline into the forward motion in your car, approximately 79% of that energy is lost either to friction, engine thermal and heat losses, wind resistance, braking, parasitic losses (various motors and pumps), and idling time. It obviously varies a lot from car to car, but even in the best-case scenario, a gasoline-powered car is only about 20-25% efficient. In the case of an electric motor, there are a lot less moving parts (no radiator, pistons, crankshafts, clutch, pumps, etc) meaning the motor itself has an efficiency of about 99%. Even when you add wind resistance, friction, etc, the first generation Tesla Roadster had an efficiency of about 88%, compared to the best gas-powered car at 25%! That means more than triple the distance traveled for the amount of energy you’re putting into your car!
2. Electric Vehicles are 10 times cheaper to charge
Assuming 12,000 miles per year, Seba compared the costs of charging the Tesla Roadster to the fuel costs of a Jeep Liberty.
- Jeep Liberty: $3000 per year (According to Consumer Reports)
- Tesla Roadster: $313 per year (Assuming an average cost of electricity of 12 cents/kWh)
Why? Because electricity is cheaper than gasoline and electric motors are more efficient.
3. Electric Vehicles are 10 times cheaper to maintain
Electric motors have a lot fewer parts than a gasoline engine does. Just to name a few, an electric motor doesn’t need:
- Oil (No oil changes!!!)
- Spark Plugs (No spark plug changes!)
- Starter/Alternator
- Fuel Injectors
- Filters
- Exhaust
- Etc.
More parts means more places that a car can break down and require repair/replacement. There isn’t enough data yet to say for sure, but some estimates suggest that electric cars have 90% less maintenance, meaning a much cheaper cost to maintain.
4. Electric vehicles will disrupt the gasoline car aftermarket
This one is a corollary to number 3; less maintenance and fewer parts breaking down mean that profits that normally come from selling replacement parts nearly disappear. Replacing things like replacement oil filters, spark plugs, transmission parts, etc. become a thing of the past.
5. Wireless charging
If you have a smartphone that can be charged via an induction power transfer charging plate, then you know how this technology works! By simply placing your smartphone on a small flat disc, you can charge your phone without wires! This technology is already being applied to buses even now in Italy. These buses charge every time they arrive at a bus stop, receiving small recharges every time it stops to let people off and on. Once electric cars become more widespread, induction charging technology could potentially be installed in parking lots or owners’ garages as well, eliminating the troublesome need to connect your car to a wall socket every time you arrive home. Whenever you enter your garage, your car would charge itself! We may even see a day when your car gains charge every time you stop at a red light, or in a parking street with induction charging enabled!
6. The EV has modular design architecture
In a gas-powered car, it has never made sense to have more than 1 engine; they’re big, heavy, and require a lot of complex moving parts. Not so with an electric motor. This means an electric car can have as many motors as you want: one powering each wheel! This means that your EV’s computer can get much greater control over traction and the wheels’ rotation, which makes a big difference in efficiency as well as safety. It also means that if one motor were to brake, the others can compensate and you could still drive your car until you could get a replacement!
If you REALLY wanna see something cool that modular electric motors could potentially do, check out this video of the Nissan prototype car, the Pivo 3, using individually-controlled motors to demonstrate amazing mobility. It also has the ability to parallel park by turning it’s wheels fully 90 degrees.
7. Big data and fast product development
EVs are controlled by a computer. And, much like smartphones, one thing a computer is great at is collecting data. EV companies can collect user data to understand consumer usage patterns and car problems and identify fixes that need to be made. This means that the development cycle for EVs is much faster, as the companies are able to adapt quickly to consumers’ needs.
Have you ever woken up to find that your gas-powered car suddenly gained efficiency? Or that it had gained the ability to do something it hadn’t the night before? That is a semi-common experience for owners of Tesla via its over-the-air software upgrades. Tesla will often send out software patches that are automatically downloaded and updated into the software of their vehicles: efficiency upgrades, functionality upgrades, and even some upgrades that are ‘just for fun,’ like the addition of Netflix or games that can be played while the car is set to Park.
8. Solar and electric vehicles are 400 times more land efficient
By combining solar panels and photovoltaic technology with EVs, the cost of fueling your car decreases greatly. But not only is the cost lower, but compared to gasoline-powered cars, solar can achieve the same amount of energy for a lot less land-use. Seba analyzed how many square miles it takes to power the US transportation industry via oil/gas and solar energy.
Oil and gas industries lease 143,000 square miles of land for oil/gas production…And even so that only produces enough gasoline to power one third of America’s transportation needs. That means to power all of the US transportation needs with fossil fuel, you’d need to 429,000 square miles of land to drill for enough oil to generate enough oil.
But with solar, assuming all transportation were electric with the energy efficiency of a Nissan Leaf, you could power ALL of the US ground transportation with just 875 square miles of solar panels. That is, a 29×29 mi square of solar panels. This is a level of land-efficient oil can never even come close to.
And with solar panels, there is no risk of oil spills.
9. Electric vehicles can contribute to grid storage and other services
The future energy grid will be dominated by solar and wind. The pure economics alone means that no industry will be able to stop the advancement of solar and wind. But with solar and wind, the biggest problem is getting power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. This means storage. And while the transition happens, the grid operators will be looking for ways to store all of that solar and wind energy.
This is where your EV sitting at home in your garage can participate: your car could help provide energy to the grid when you’re not using it! It could help with the power balancing of the entire grid network. In return, you could potentially collect fees from your local electric companies. In this way, your electric car and the time you’re not driving it generates you income, all while helping the entire electric grid. Would you take $100 a month for the grid to make use of your car as a small battery when you’re not driving it? I would.
And we haven’t even talked about self-driving yet.
One of the biggest reasons that EVs will disrupt the transportation industry is the development of automated, self-driving vehicles. A hotly debated subject, self-driving has not quite gotten to the point of total automation yet. And I can’t stress that part enough. Not yet.
But it will. All it will take is more data collection and a few more years of development, and all cars and trucks will be able to fully self-drive themselves with no assistance from a driver. And once this happens, there are no economic nor practical reason to continue using a gasoline-powered car. Imagine being able to just get into your car, set a destination, then read a book, watch Netflix, or work. The amount of time this development would free up alone would make people switch over to electric vehicles.
An Electric Future
Tony Seba pretty much understands exactly what will happen, but his estimates are not based on gut-feelings or bias towards renewable energy. He makes these predictions based on fact and economic analysis. We are heading for an electric world, not because we want to be more eco-friendly, not because we have a bias towards Tesla, we are heading for an electric world because it’s cheapest to do so. Because it makes more economic sense. And in an electric world where everything is powered by cheap electricity, an electric car just makes more sense.
In essence, the electric car will do to transportation what the iPhone did to the communication. Saying “an electric car is just a new vehicle to drive around” is much the same as saying an iPhone is “just a new device to make phone calls.” It can, and will, do so much more. So much so that to drive a gasoline-powered car will make no more sense than using a horse as your main mode of transportation in the new age.
There are still many out there who love their gasoline-powered cars and hate the idea of EVs taking over, and I understand that feeling! I’ve always been a car enthusiast and there are some gas-powered cars I love. In the future, those who still love their gas-powered cars will still be able to own and drive them! You’ll still be able to get gasoline for them. But for most people and for most transportation, EVs will be the way to go.
Thanks to Tony Seba
I want to thank Tony Seba, who I believe understands exactly where the energy industry is going and how it will be severely disrupted by the incoming renewable energy movement. His book is a fantastic read on the future of energy. If you are interested in reading more on this topic, I highly recommend that you read his book, Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation: How Silicon Valley Will Make Oil, Nuclear, Natural Gas, Coal, Electric Utilities and Conventional Cars Obsolete by 2030