Ray Wills, an Ozzie futurist, has long had as optimistic forecasts as Tony Seba for battery and EV cost declines and EV take-up rates. Both their forecasts have turned out to be on the mark, while other more conservative forecasters, including BNEF, have underestimated just how rapidly EVs are going to gain market share.
Electric cars will hit price parity with petrol by 2023 and be the only cars produced by 2026, while many city petrol stations will be obsolete within a decade, says a Perth 'futurist'. Ray Wills is managing director of advisory firm Future Smart Strategies, which examines the growth of commodities in the marketplace.
Professor Wills, who is also a board member of remote energy services provider Horizon Power and former chief executive of the Sustainable Energy Association of Australia, said anyone thinking of buying a car would be well advised to wait a few years if possible.
“The future is coming faster than we think,” he said. “And when it arrives, we always say it was faster than we thought.”
Future Smart had been modelling since 2012 and its models had been “robust” since 2014, he said. It also “post-casted”, evaluating previous performance. In 2015, Future Smart Strategies projected 1.85 million EVs would be sold globally in 2018; it turned out to be 2.02 million.
Professor Wills said his models, while more aggressive than those of traditional forecasters such as Bloomberg and Deloitte, were less so than his nearest neighbour in approach, Stanford University’s Tony Seba, who had estimated EVs would be the only vehicles produced by 2025.
He said the disruptive power of electrics was visible in their eclipse of hybrids: for the past decade, 1.5 million hybrids had been sold. More EVs than that were sold in 2018 alone.
“When you see a disrupted market, it’s the thing that has the momentum that rules the day,” he said. “Nobody will ever be exactly right. But I have been labelled as a futurist and the art of a futurist is to be the least wrong.”
Professor Wills said last year, the global car industry announced a total $400 billion investment into EVs and in addition so far this year, another $100 billion forward investment up to 2025. Volkswagen had announced in excess of $40 billion. Even Toyota, a “laggard” until recently, in May announced a $20 billion forward investment on EVs and advanced plans for electrification by five years.
“Is there a factory specially set up for Australia? No. Australia will buy what the world builds,” he said.
“Electrification as I see it will be virtually complete by 2026, the only cars built in my opinion will be electric, with the exception of some specialist bespoke vehicles.”
He said the average age of the 18 million cars in the Australian fleet was 10 years. He predicted 5 per cent of them would be replaced by EVs by the early 2020s, 50 per cent by 2036 and almost all of them by 2046. Currently the cheapest EV in Australia was the Nissan Leaf, costing $50-70,000, and while there was no doubt that people would wait until EVs were affordable to buy one, he said by 2022-3 they would be in the $20,000 range.
While still dearer than a comparative petrol car, they would save $1000 per year on fuel costs which would outstrip the additional initial outlay within two years, he said. Professor Wills said the only car market in Australia growing was EVs; petrol car sales had stalled for 18 months and while economic conditions were part of it, he believed there was more to it than that.
“It’s seen with iPhone models ... we will hold on to the old one if we know a new one is coming," he said. “People are thinking, I will wait and see what happens. Once EVs are here combustion [car] prices will fall ... at some point they will become unsellable and that’s the point people won’t want to get caught in. It’ll be like buying a flip phone. People will know there’s a better option.”
He said anywhere you could plug in a hair dryer, you could plug in an EV.
"On the street you’ll need a little infrastructure,” he said. “[But] it’s not an NBN rollout ... it’s not a $40 billion project, more like a $4 billion project.”
Petrol sales would thus be eroded and Australia would generate electricity for cars using local, renewable energy power plants, freed of the need to import $15 billion annually in oil and oil products for motor cars.
“Over the past 20-30 years, as we’ve gone to a self-serve petrol station then pay at pump, we lost all the corner store type stations ... replaced by the big main road stations,” he said.
“Next step will be a rationalisation of larger volume petrol stations. In the 2020s you will see some older petrol stations closing instead of being upgraded. The biggest ones will be the best protected and as the petrol and diesel market is eroded you’ll see the attrition of the outlets, just as the internet has eroded retail sales.”
On regional highways and national highways they would continue to operate as fast charging points.
“Australians will still have “range anxiety”, it’s prevalent here because of the distances, but there are already vehicles that can do 400 miles without a charge, and most of us can’t do that without a pee,” he said. “You’ll need to recharge yourself before you’ll need to charge that car. Right now, 150KW is less than an hour; a stop for a tea, a pie and a tinkle.”
Key to the puzzle would be the arrival of electrified trucks, he said, and that would be a clearer situation within two years. China was rolling out all buses, trucks and taxis to be electric, both for energy efficiency and air quality; building 181 electric buses per day. Australia had 36 electric buses in operation, by comparison.
