Electric cars and solar power could be huge by 2025-2030

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Tony Seba has predicted a big shift to solar power and electric cars beginning in 2017 or 2018

Seba’s believes in the inevitable disruption in the internal combustion engine. By his forecast, between 2017 and 2018, a mass migration from gasoline or diesel cars will begin, rapidly picking up steam and culminating in a market entirely dominated by electric vehicles (EV) by 2030.

Not only will our cars be electric, Seba predicts, but rapid developments in self-driving technologies will mean that future EVs will also be autonomous. The game-change is happening because of revolutionary cost-reductions in information technology, and because EVs are 90 percent cheaper to fuel and maintain than gasoline cars.

Seba estimates that by 2020, battery costs will fall to $200 kWh, and by 2024-25 to $100 kWh. At this point, the efficiency of a gasoline car would be irrelevant, as EVs would simply be far cheaper. By 2030, he predicts, “gasoline cars will be the 21st century equivalent of horse carriages.”

It took only 13 years for societies to transition from complete reliance on horse-drawn carriages to roads teeming with primitive automobiles.

This vision requires that there be 150 to 300 gigabattery factories and the accompanying massive scaling in all aspects of the supply chain for batteries and electric car components.

Within just 15 years, Seba predicts solar and wind power will provide 100 percent of energy in competitive markets, with no need for government subsidies.

Nextbigfuture wrote about a possible battery-electric car-robotic car singularity back in 2014.

The Battery singularity would be the electric car singularity.

Batteries (and electric engines) that replace gasoline (and combustion engines) but at lower lifetime costs have the potential to completely replace combustion engines. I believe the costs will be brought down and the factory construction and scaling of the supply chain will take until about 2025. We could get to 10 million electric cars per year by about 2020 and then to 100 million by 2025.

This would likely mean that Tesla with its large lead in electric cars would likely be selling as many cars as Toyota now and possibly 2 to 3 times as many. This would be 10 to 30 million cars.

Chinese consumers are expected to purchase between 220,000 and 250,000 electric cars this year, making the country the world’s largest market for the vehicles.

The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM), which announced the China sales data, says that US sales are expected to reach 180,000 this year, allowing China’s electric car market to overtake the US’s for the first time.

China’s government wants 5 million electric vehicles by 2020.

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