Carmageddon is Coming

We’re on the cusp of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruption in transport history

Angus Hervey
Future Crunch
Published in
8 min readJun 14, 2017

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Image credit: Snohetta

Pssstt… prefer listening to reading? You can get this article in podcast form , courtesy of good folks at The Frontier, right here.

An overlapping confluence of three different technological waves — the smartphone, the electric vehicle and artificial intelligence — have created the conditions for a technological disruption so profound it’s going to change almost everything about the way we move in modern society.

The first of the three waves is something most of us have already experienced: the ability to summon a car and a driver with your phone. Millions of people use ride sharing every day. When the CEO of the world’s biggest ride sharing company behaves like a dick and is forced to quit, it makes headline news around the world. Incidentally, now that Uber doesn’t have a CEO, COO, CTO or CFO we guess this is the closest it’s ever been to a self-driving car company? (nice one, Mariya Yao)

The second technological wave is the arrival of the electric vehicle. Tesla is now regularly valued as one of the planet’s 5 most valuable automakers and there are already more than 2 million electric vehicles on the world’s roads. While the falling costs of batteries get most of the attention in the media, the truly revolutionary bit in an electric vehicle is actually the drivetrain. That’s because the drivetrain for an internal combustion engine contains about 2,000 parts while an electric one contains about 20. A system with two orders of magnitude fewer parts is way more reliable and saves money by eliminating around half the cost of traditional car maintenance. It gives electric vehicles much longer lifespans. The average combustion vehicle lasts about 250,000 km, while current estimates for the lifespans of today’s electric vehicles are around 800,000 km.

You know how the value of a car drops by a quarter when you drive it out the dealer? Well, not if it’s electric.

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Angus Hervey
Future Crunch

From Melbourne and Cape Town, with love. Political economist and journalist, and co-founder of futurecrun.ch