[Arcades]

Originally Posted by GrussGott

This may sound odd, but i'm concerned about (high) fuel prices over the next few years and beyond ... I've been watching the transition to electric energy and it's happening even faster than I thought. Sorry for the long post ...

People are missing a few things:

* Obviously $0 oil will make fuel cheap in the short-term, but will also kill small oil producing companies and disincent the creation of new ones; as well as hurting Big Oil, halting new projects, etc. Eventually, however, that decreasing supply of newly pumped oil and the decreasing supply of stored oil will get used up ... and it won't be cheap to restart pumping and there won't be as many companies to do it. At a minimum this will cause a delay, plus those companies that have survived will be looking to make up for their losses ...

* It's not ICE vs BEV, it's efficient-energy-point-of-access: when a consumer needs energy for any reason how do they access it? Most things are now electric except cars because it's just more convenient, familiar, and easy-to-use: it's at your house in your outlet. Petrol requires a separate trip ... which might be ok if you're out making trips but WFH, Amazon, covid ...

* Electric energy can be created directly by the consumer and is massively portable: not only can you charge, say, a Goal Zero Yeti battery with solar or wind, you can bring it anywhere with you to power anything with a plug, including using it for a backup generator for storms, etc. That's pretty convenient and removes consumer friction.

* As more devices turn electric (yard tools, etc) economies of scale shift over to them, making them cheaper, more variety, and more available; and simultaneously ICE becomes less available, less variety, and more expensive

* As home delivery increases there's going to be less need for gasoline (incl autonomous BEV delivery testing in Houston with up to 5000 vehicles!) which will disincent pumpers from pumping, refiners from refining, and gas stations from selling. (e.g., Amazon is buying 100,000 BEVs from Rivian for home delivery)

* Institutional investors have turned away from Big Oil leading to people like Jim Cramer calling it "dead" - this effectively makes new projects for oil companies more expensive so they take a double hit: fuel demand is dropping and costs of new projects are rising.

* Obviously all auto manufacturers have massive BEV projects (though they may be put on hold, we'll see), thus the new cars being produced will become more and more BEV, and consumers more easily making a choice for a car that happens to be BEV vs because it's BEV.

* China has committed to being the largest BEV builder by 2025, assuming that sticks, and if covid's lack of ICE traffic decreases people's tolerance for air pollution, and Europe continues with its regulatory trajectory, then the World's #1 and #3 vehicle markets will be full BEV

OTOH, yes, there are 10-20 years of cheap used ICE cars out there, very cheap to own, rural America hates BEVs, no pickup trucks, etc ...

... but if over the next 2 years fuel prices started rising and cheap used electric cars become more prevalent (e.g., Nissan Leaf, Prius, et al), and there are a real variety of BEV trucks (cybertruck, Rivian, Ford) and they're better, etc ...

I'm not making the oh no high gas prices argument, rather in 2-5 years ICE cars might be very hard to sell and used prices could fall significantly (and thus lease prices - at some point - will also increase significantly). For me, for the last 15 years, a fun ICE car has been worth ~$20k-$25k/year but I'm not gonna go higher than that and honestly I'm not sure it's still worth that much, though if there continues to be no ability to travel then maybe it still is ... but there's also no way I'm going to store a car I'm not using or maintain a 5+ year old car so ...

Anyway, if it's not obvious, I wrote this up to think it all through, and I'm pretty sure my line is $20k/year assuming I can use the car most days and do some sport driving a few times/month. If I can't then it's probably not worth that much and I would move that money to other hobbies.

Thanks for listening! Wait. Is anybody still listening? no? That's fair.

Considering we have a Plug In Prius Prime, I know the experience extremely well. I can easily push this car about 1k+ miles before needing to refill again. However, because my father drives with a lead foot now a days, he kind of pulls it down. Generally I can push it to like 30+ miles purely on EV before it switches over. It's even a plus for us since we have solar panels so it isn't really affecting our electric bill. That is why that thread on the PHEV 3er where some whiners are, er well whining. I didn't bother to jump in because most of them don't understand the handiness of having a PHEV car.

Personally, I have always planned on getting a simple DD other than my M3 (or whichever it might end up being at the moment). I thought of a Accord before, of course a Giulia came up too. I am probably going to avoid getting the G20 3er because the seats are uncomfortable for me. Obviously the options for a PHEV is getting more and more numerous but going full EV is probably not going to happen for me. Primarily because we would need to tear out part of our wall to install the faster charging thing necessary to even make it a thing. It takes us 6 hours to charge our 18 Prius Prime. A full EV would take longer than a day. It's far too much of a hassle.