Why Cheap Transportation Is Important For All Of Us
Is the rapid shift to electric vehicles a sustainable solution, or could it lead to skyrocketing transportation costs?
In this video I explore the hidden economic and social consequences of electrifying our fleets, including:
Vehicle prices
The charging challenge
If you would prefer to read about it, there is a transcript below the video.
Why Cheap Transportation Is Important For All Of Us - Video Transcript
The price of transportation is likely to increase dramatically over the coming years, but cheap transportation is important for all of us for several reasons.
Governments plan to replace petrol and diesel vehicles by electric ones, but electric vehicles are more expensive than their petrol and diesel counterparts. For example, electric cars are 50% more expensive, and electric trucks are 2 to 3 times more expensive, and electric vans are 50 to 100% more expensive.
Charging infrastructure has not been expanded to a level where all transportation can be done by electric vehicles, and this is also a reason for the increasing cost of electric transportation.
According to Elon Musk, grid capacity also needs to expand almost everywhere to facilitate the charging of rapidly increasing share of cars and trucks, and power generation also needs to expand dramatically in all countries to supply enough charging capacity at hours of peak demand.
As vehicle fleets will be turned electric over the next decade, the cost of transportation will soar. Vehicles will become more expensive to buy, and power prices will increase as demand will far exceed supply many times during most days of the week.
A lot of time will be spent waiting for chargers to be freed up as the expansion of charging infrastructure lags behind. Waiting in line costs money for professional drivers and for ordinary citizens that need to do other things with their time than wait for charging. Shortages of power generation and grid capacity will cause delays in waiting times.
And to summarise, the cost of transportation will increase previously unseen level.
Cheap transportation is one of the basis of modern society. Efficiency in all parts of value chains and society overall is the reason behind our comfortable lifestyles and why we can afford to buy many things, eat and drink well, etc.
Companies and job markets depend on efficient transportation, and with higher transportation costs, many companies will go bankrupt, and many jobs will be lost, not only jobs in the transportation business.
These things can be quite easily calculated.
Higher transportation costs mean higher prices of all types of goods and services. Transportation is now a small part of the price of most goods and services, but the share of the price will increase and everything will become more expensive. Significant increases in prices will occur if electric trucks will have to spend a lot of time charging during busy working days, which is likely to happen frequently if vehicle fleets expand rapidly according to the plans of the EU and national governments.
Higher prices mean that people and companies can buy less, and many companies and shops are likely to go out of business or lose a big share of their turnover if transportation prices increase by 15 to 20% or perhaps more.
We need to change to electric vehicles but in a structured way.
No overall analysis have been made by governments or companies of the economic and social consequences of the rapid change to electric vehicles. It is already hard for many people and families to make ends meet and many already struggle financially. So companies will lose business and families will lose jobs.
Read my recent book, the severe economic and social consequences of the rapid change to electric vehicles to find out more about the change.
I will continue to share my knowledge about the different aspects of the change to electric vehicles. If you like this video, press subscribe to the YouTube channel, or join the email community below.