Last September at the “Engine and Environment” conference in Graz, Austria, Futurist Lars Thomsen (founder and Chief Futurist of Future Matters) forecasted that starting 2016, electric cars will make gasoline cars obsolete. He believes consumers will quickly change their car-buying behavior because electric cars will be such a disruptive and demanded technology.
In Thomsen’s scenario, two factors lead to the tipping point for electric cars: the cost and the range of the car battery. Technology is taking care of both concerns – companies such as Nissan, BMW and Tesla have been researching, manufacturing and improving electric cars for years. Tesla Motors, Inc. currently offers the fully electric Model S, which ranges from $70,000 to $100,000 and travels about 265 miles on a single charge. The company plans to manufacture electric cars and sell them at $30,000 with similar mileage within a few years. Furthermore, Thomsen points out that by 2016, there will be significantly more electric charging stations popping up, especially in Europe.
His overall forecast: By 2016, the demand for internal combustion engine vehicles will decline massively, the demand for hybrids will likely collapse by 2018, and government regulations to increase gas mileage and reduce carbon emissions on vehicles will become meaningless since we’ll all be buying zero-emission cars anyway.
