• About
    • Which Energy Mix is this?
  • Climate News Network Archive
  • Contact
The climate news that makes a difference.
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
  FEATURED
Hamilton Plans Canada’s First Heat Bylaw for Rental Housing May 29, 2023
UK Traffic Calming Strategy Produces Solid Results, Manufactured Anxiety May 29, 2023
Community Wind Farm Earns Support, Generates Income in German Village May 29, 2023
13 Canadian Fossils Linked to Massive Losses in Western Wildfires May 27, 2023
‘Remarkable Rebuke’: 130 U.S, EU Legislators Ask UN to Ditch Fossil CEO as COP 28 Chair May 23, 2023
Next
Prev

EVs, Car-Sharing Could Be the Death of Auto Dealerships

June 13, 2017
Reading time: 3 minutes

mmurphy / Pixabay

mmurphy / Pixabay

 

Car dealerships could go the way of the vanished video store in as little as 10 years, a San Francisco think tank argues.

In their study for RethinkX, technology investor James Arbib and Stanford University economist Tony Seba argue that “greater demand for electric cars, coupled with increased demand for ride sharing” will kill off the familiar car dealership, with its new and used lots and service bays, in the next seven years, CBC News reports.

  • Concise headlines. Original content. Timely news and views from a select group of opinion leaders. Special extras.
  • Everything you need, nothing you don’t.
  • The Weekender: The climate news you need.
Subscribe

Arbib and Seba believe the tipping point will come once electric cars can travel more than 320 kilometres on a single charge and cost in “the $20,000-dollar range,” instead of $30,000 and up.

Dealers may continue to sell vehicles (although Tesla has challenged that model, suing U.S. states for the right to sell directly to customers), but their revenues will be threatened. A main culprit is that EVs—apart from their batteries—are likely to last longer than gasoline or diesel cars, simply due to their simplicity. “You only have 20 moving parts in the power train of an electric vehicle, but 2,000 in the power train of a gasoline vehicle, so there is far less to go wrong,” said Arbib.

“Right now, Tesla is offering infinite kilometre warranties,” CBC News reports. Arbib expects the lifetime of these vehicles to be about 800,000 kilometres in the early 2020s, and potentially 1.6 million kilometres by 2030. That has several implications. Dealers will see fewer replacement sales as vehicles last longer, CBC notes. And “people will spend less time bringing in their cars to dealerships for repairs and servicing.”

The two Californians also expect big things from various forms of car- and ride-sharing. By 2020, they write, “using transport as a service will be four to 10 times cheaper per mile than buying a new car, and two to four times cheaper than operating an existing paid-off vehicle.” 

The report lands as Canadians have been snapping up new gas and diesel vehicles at record rates, supporting more than 150,000 jobs at dealerships in the first quarter of 2017. Doug Heeney, a fleet sales manager at busy Campbell Ford in Ottawa, dismissed the report’s outlook. EVs will “be a percentage of our industry,” Heeney forecast, “but I don’t think the electric vehicle, especially in Canada, is going to overtake or eliminate the current vehicles we’ve got for sale.”

Ontario auto industry analyst Dennis Desrosiers found “some serious questions marks and a lot of assumptions” in the two authors’ forecast. In particular, Desrosiers doubts the pair’s predictions about the falling cost of manufacturing and operating electric vehicles.

The Californians are far from alone, however. Swiss investment bank UBS, factoring in those lower repair and fuel costs, predicts that electric vehicles will be cheaper to own and operate than gasoline models by next year. Bloomberg forecasts that EVs will carry lower initial sticker prices before 2025. And the Financial Post reported recently that some in the fossil energy supply industry are beginning to worry that “the rising relevance of electric vehicles, along with drastically reduced costs for wind- and solar-powered sources of energy,” could cause “oil demand [to] begin to shrivel in the next 10 to 15 years.”

As for Arbib, he has two brands he likes to name-check for people who don’t think the transition can happen that fast. Nokia and Kodak are “examples” he says, “of companies that have fallen by the wayside, taken by surprise by the scale and speed of these disruptions.”



in Auto & Alternative Vehicles, Community Climate Finance, International, Jobs & Training

The latest climate news and analysis, direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Related Posts

Jörg Möller/Pixabay
Cities & Communities

UK Traffic Calming Strategy Produces Solid Results, Manufactured Anxiety

May 29, 2023
1
kpgolfpro/Pixabay
Community Climate Finance

Community Wind Farm Earns Support, Generates Income in German Village

May 29, 2023
4
FMSC/Flickr
Finance & Investment

Waive Debt to Unlock Urgently Needed Adaptation Funds, Researchers Urge

May 27, 2023
22

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Trending Stories

Martin Davis/Facebook

13 Canadian Fossils Linked to Massive Losses in Western Wildfires

May 28, 2023
325
pixabay

Anti-Mob Laws to Prosecute Fossils, Kudos for Calgary, 113M Climate Refugees, Orcas Fight Back, and a Climate Dictionary

May 24, 2023
132
Inspiration 4 Photos/flickr

Cooling Upper Atmosphere Has Scientists ‘Very Worried’

May 23, 2023
271
University of Oxford Press Office/flickr

PEROVSKITES: Qcells Plans First Production Line for ‘Miracle’ Solar Cell

May 23, 2023
435
Arctic Circle/flickr

‘Remarkable Rebuke’: 130 U.S, EU Legislators Ask UN to Ditch Fossil CEO as COP 28 Chair

May 23, 2023
399
François GOGLINS/wikimedia commons

Corrosion Problem Shutters Half of France’s Nuclear Reactors

August 2, 2022
3.7k

Recent Posts

Neal Alderson/Twitter

Out-of-Control Wildfire Burns Homes, Forces Evacuations Outside Halifax

May 29, 2023
13
York Region/flickr

Hamilton Plans Canada’s First Heat Bylaw for Rental Housing

May 29, 2023
1
Jörg Möller/Pixabay

UK Traffic Calming Strategy Produces Solid Results, Manufactured Anxiety

May 29, 2023
1

Waste Heat from Quebec Data Centre to Grow 80,000 Tonnes of Veggies Per Year

May 29, 2023
2
kpgolfpro/Pixabay

Community Wind Farm Earns Support, Generates Income in German Village

May 29, 2023
4
Pexels/pixabay

Engineers Replace Sand in Concrete with Disposable Diapers

May 29, 2023
4
Next Post
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Governor_Jerry_Brown_2014.jpg

UN Climate Secretary Opens Door for Cities, States to Join Paris Accord

The Energy Mix - The climate news you need

Copyright 2023 © Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy and Copyright
  • Cookie Policy

Proudly partnering with…

scf_withtagline
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}