The value of any investment can fall as well as rise and investors may not get back the amount invested.
For the first time since the advent of the internal combustion engine, a complete transformation in car transport is underway.
Instead of personally-owned, gasoline-powered, human-driven vehicles, the advanced economies are transitioning to electric-powered and driverless vehicles, paid for by the trip or by subscription schemes. This great shift promises to solve the many problems arising from the way we currently get from A to B.
Car ownership as a condition of social inclusion and prosperity dates to Henry Ford and his dream to build a car “so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one”. Not only did Ford make cars cheap, he enabled his own workers to buy them by introducing the $5-per-day salary in 1914.
In the US, Ford helped create a country where car ownership was a requirement, not just an aspiration. His mass-produced Model T coincided with the discovery of large reservoirs of crude oil in Texas and Oklahoma. The low price of energy-dense petroleum meant that the oil and automotive industries grew rich quick and were able to lobby government for more highways and fewer railways.
In the US today, 212 million licensed drivers own 252 million light-duty vehicles. They drive 3.2 trillion miles a year, burning more than 180 billion gallons of fuel, making up about half of total US oil consumption. Car and truck emissions comprise a fifth of greenhouse gases. The distance travelled by car keeps growing. Vehicle miles jumped as much as 50 per cent from 1990 to 2016.
Clocking up those miles is a horrendously inefficient business. Over 95 per cent of the cars sold in the US run on gasoline but less than 30 per cent of that energy is translated into motion. The rest is used to power headlights, radios and air conditioners or is wasted on heat and noise. Since cars typically weigh 20 times more than a person, that means a mere 1.5 per cent of the gasoline’s energy is spent moving the driver from A to B.
Such shocking inefficiencies arise because cars are massively overbuilt. In the US, 85 per cent of travel is by automobile, with an average occupancy of just 1.1 people per vehicle commuting to work. Average speeds in cities are often less than 30 miles per hour (mph) and can run as low as 12 mph in congested areas.
Yet our cars are built for at least five adults with engines that can make the car reach 120 mph. Heavier propulsion and chassis systems drive up costs and increase risks. The World Health Organisation estimates that car crashes kill 1.35m people a year. That includes approximately 40,000 Americans – the equivalent of a 737 plane falling out of the sky every day.
Worse still, American automobiles sit unused about 95 per cent of the time and must be parked somewhere when idle. Towns and cities devote valuable real estate to car parks and garages, at the expense of green space, schools and hospitals. Parked end-to-end, Earth’s cars would encircle our planet nearly 100 times – and that’s just with the existing ratio of one vehicle for every eight humans.
Finally, traffic congestion is a global disaster. More than half the world’s population lives in cities, a proportion expected to climb to 70 per cent by 2050. That presents big challenges in transportation, infrastructure and safety. Congestion costs each American an estimated 97 hours (four days) per year, or $1,348 annually, a total of $87bn in 2018.
Henry Ford’s dream has become a burden. The car is such an underutilised asset that the car industry is now one of the most disruptable businesses on earth. The forces of that disruption, meanwhile, are achieving unstoppable momentum.
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Important Information and risk factors
The views expressed in this article are those of Thaiha Nguyen and should not be considered as advice or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold a particular investment. They reflect personal opinion and should not be taken as statements of fact nor should any reliance be placed on them when making investment decisions.
This communication was produced and approved in December 2020 and has not been updated subsequently. It represents views held at the time of writing and may not reflect current thinking.
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