So with 2030 regs and many vehicle manufacturers already committing to abandoning fossil fuels. When will petrolheads life get too hard? Will it happen before 2030 or will it be gradual?
Will the streets be cleaner and safer?
Will people abandon cars and default to self driving ubers?

It will be taxed. This way the people with expensive cars, who can afford it will continue to have their expensive cars and the great unwashed will have to make do with whatever the option is.

The justification will run along the lines of there wil be far fewer cars, and the owners pay a much higher rate.
CEO,MD etc will be able to put it down to a tax expense or such so in effect will have a loophole.

Plenty of Petrolheads are already buying Taycans, Model S Plaid, etc and there are plenty more to come, but in the short term, I think you’ll see a golden age of petrol engines before they’re forced into obsolescence.

As for self driving cars, it’ll kill the service industries like taxis and local buses first, then trains, finally personal vehicles and possibly short range aircraft.

it’ll still be available (maybe in kit form – I could imagine a car designed with an extremely cheap electric motor and battery, that you rip out day one and replace with an engine/fuel tank – ala chicken tax) for those who really want it. Owning one will be a bit like owning a horse – an expensive PITA for country folk who like that sort of thing

It’s a good question I think and it really depends on who you ask.

My opinions

The ‘Motoring Press’ are by and large in denial, but it’s been decades since most of them really had much to do with what most people drive, honestly if you think the likes of Jeremy Clarkson, Chris Harris and Harry Metcalf have their finger on the pulse of mainstream motoring, you’re probably wrong. I get the impression they’re hoping and praying for some kind of 11th hour stay of execution, that Hydrogen combustion cars or eFuels will ride into save the day, because really they don’t care about everyday cars, because they’re just another consumer device to them, and frankly most of us too.

I think the reality is that the ICE car is pretty much dead in terms of new development, the latest generation of ICE cars (and Vans tbh) are really just refreshed versions of old ones, they look a bit different, but they’re the same engines and same chassis from 10 years ago. All the big manufacturers are throwing themselves at EV tech in a big way. Forget 2030, I predict by 2025 ICE cars will be in the minority with manufacturers and the mainstream brands will have dropped them completely a few years before 2030.

As for existing ICE cars, well the mainstream stuff doesn’t really matter, the average life expectancy of a car is now only around 10 years, but that’s going to fall as the switch to EVs takes over. For the enthusiast stuff, to them it doesn’t really matter if you can buy your fuel at a dozen petrol stations in every town, or if you have to have it delivered on the back of a truck, when your Ferrari or MG only comes out 3 times a year.

The biggest ‘threat’ to Petrolheads isn’t ICE cars, it’s a generational thing, kids don’t care about cars like their parents did. My Son who is 15 doesn’t know the make, or model of my Car, he knows what it looks like when I pick him up and that’s it. When I was a kid we all knew every stats of our Dads cars to compare them, top trumps like in School, no one cares anymore, even the younger guys who are into cars don’t care about how they’re powered, just how fashionable (or whatever the term) they are. Honestly, Guys keeping £1m+ hypercars in their garage as investments are in for a shock in years to come as people who care and are prepared to pay for them die and new car fans aren’t replacing them.

I reckon within our lifetime the ICU will become completely unacceptable like drink driving, smoking, lead in paint or arsenic wood preservaties, we’ll wander round going I can’t believe we used to drive those things belching out all that crap into the air we breathe.

PJay – yep agree. But why are cars only lasting 10 years? My 2009 Mazda has just sailed through another MOT and I’m hoping to keep it for another few years now.

we’ll wander round going I can’t believe we used to drive those things belching out all that crap into the air we breathe.

definitely. Recently out on my bike I had the following experience:

Me: Cor, look at that TR6! What a cracking machine
Me, 1 minute later: Bloody hell, something stinks around here. Where are all these horrible petrol fumes coming from?
Me, another minute later, as I catch up with the TR6 at the lights: Ah. God that thing is kicking out some shite….

Compared to a busy street full of modern ‘normal’ cars, it really was horrible!

The air will be cleaner but roads no safer. The growing number of cars is a major problem, replacing them with what look like faster ones is hardly helpful.

Will it happen before 2030 or will it be gradual?

It will be gradual. A lot of fossil fuel companies are going to make sure of it and there will be demand for petrol easily past 2040 (the cars purchased in 2029 will only be 10 years old).
Once it starts to become harder to get petrol (2045?) the number of pumps will drop considerably and it may take a 50 mile drive to go and get some petrol.

It won’t matter by then as it will be a small number of enthusiasts and the day’s classic car owners who only drive 1,000 miles a year in them while 99.9% of miles will be driven in EVs.
The world will be pretty **** up by 2045 though so worrying about petrol cars is not the right thing to be worrying about.

driverless cars will take over at some point, so they’ll all be electric you’d imagine. The combustion engine will become more of an enthisiast type thing.

There’s no need for it to completely disappear, we just need a high 90+% of it to transition over.

TBH I don’t think I will miss the ICE, I’m not enough of a petrolhead and day to day any car I own/use really has to provide reliable transport not some sort of visceral “experience”…

I also think we’re at an odd transitional point, EVs are now seen as desirable, thanks to the likes of Elon, the trouble is their wider, faster adoption is being hampered by that too. They’re seen as premium, aspirational, expensive “New tech” for the wealthy. the truth is they’re simpler machines and manufacturer’s are taking the piss a bit on pricing now. by 2030 we want to be well on the way to fully electrified transportation…

TBH 2030 can’t come soon enough.
The real question for me is, how long before other forms of transport ditch the diesel units? HGVs, trains, shipping, etc. Car’s are the consumer headline, freight and mass transit needs to follow the same trajectory.

Hydrogen combustion cars or eFuels will ride into save the day,

I don’t think save the day is the right term but hydrogen will be needed in the mix. The fantasy is that you can have one tool (electric vehicles) for multiple jobs, hydrogen will need to be there for many vehicles.

I’ve no idea, but now feels like the time to enjoy a last hurrah with an utterly socially-unacceptable fossil fuelled fun vehicle. I won’t have another car  after my current one, but will likely have a van. If electric’s possible at the time then an electric van, but if not it’ll be a dirty diesel/hybrid I imagine.

Average age of a car scrapped is nearly 14 years now and increasing – remember that includes early crash/write-offs that skew it.

Fuel cost will keep going up with or without more taxation so EVs will naturally take a lot of the market for those who can afford newer cars and actually do some miles. It didn’t take a lot of VED discount (and potential fuel savings) to sell a lot of diesel cars in the 00s, EVs present an even more compelling case as new prices glide down towards parity with ICE. More new sales means more secondhand stock that will filter down to be affordable to the vast majority of drivers.

Lots of enthusiasts go for older stuff anyway. Always a strong market of people 40+ who’ve made some money buying the cars they wanted as teenagers. When the ICE hero cars are gone though what will that be in a few decades? Will it even matter when there’s loads of enthusiast ICE cars that will still be around long after their original owners?

PJay – yep agree. But why are cars only lasting 10 years? My 2009 Mazda has just sailed through another MOT and I’m hoping to keep it for another few years now.

That’s the average now sadly. Some people say it’s the complex and expensive ‘devices’ on them and there was an era of turbo diesel that came with a handful of expensive bits that could easily ‘write off’ a 10 year old car but that doesn’t seem to be the case so much now, but as ‘old’ cars become less popular it becomes self fulfilling because they’re not ‘worth’ repairing from a financial point of view. EVs popularity will increase that, ICE is going to seem very old hat in a few years.

Others blame easy PCP deals meaning new and nearly new cars are a lot easier to have now and it certainly seems to be the case a lot of people have much newer cars than before. My first car was nearly 20 years old when I bought it, my 2nd was 10 years old etc. The stereotype of the 19 year old kid in a 12 month old PCP Focus or Corsa has a lot of truth to it, and PCP is a hard thing to give up, not a lot of people will stop leasing a new car every 3 years to go out and buy one that’s older than they’re driving now if they have to borrow money to buy it because it won’t be any cheaper on a monthly basis.

I think a unpleasant and inconvenient truth of the switch to EVs will be an accelerated shortening of ICE car lifespans, the reality is that if you want to be ‘green’ globally it’s not emissions your car produces, but that’s produced in its construction. A ‘dirty’ 20 year old ICE maintained to give an extra 10 years and 100k miles is far better than Tesla building a new 3 for you.

Personally I’m going the other way, my next car will be my last ICE (because I can’t afford an EV that works for me at the moment) when that’s done (I’m another one on the PCP merry go round) I’ll be working out how we can go from a 2 car family to 1.

For most people the EV tipping point is here, because you can now walk into a VW, Skoda, Ford or Peugeot dealler and actually see, test drive and buy a pure EV! I’m seeing a large number of ID.3 on the roads in the last few weeks, because for a huge number of people, that car is simply nicer than the equivalent golf and no more expensive.

Petrol and classics and high performance have years and years left in them though. Just like horse and traction engine enthusiasts,both of which can still be ‘driven’ on our roads despite being a hundred years out of date, ICE cars once they are a minority will be largely ignored by Governments and legislators…..

There are already some people doing EV conversions for classic vehicles – I’ll probably get one for my VW camper at some point.
There’s probably going to be a generational shift with vehicle ownership – people in cities already get by with Uber etc. Why pay for an expensive, depreciating asset on your drive when you can pay as you go?
The problem is it’s bad news for car companies who make most of their money selling finance for vehicles replaced every 3 years – sustainable and ecological it ain’t.
I bought an 18 plate petrol car last year and hope it will be my last.

Petrol/diesel will be widely available until it stops being profitable to sell it. Storage tanks coming to the end of their lives after 20-30 years may have an effect as they’re expensive to replace. I’m expecting it to be easy to get until at least 2040 though I’d guess a lot of petrol stations will also do EV charging and reduce the number of pumps. I’d also expect the haulage industry to continue using diesel for a long while.

The biggest barrier to EV’s is not being able to charge at home. Approximately 33% of households have no off street parking and some of those that do won’t have a suitable space to fit a charger next to. Does anyone actually believe that whatever flavour of government will effectively tell these people they’re going to drastically reduce their ability to travel?

But cars are usually owned for the purpose of going to places, and spend most to their time parked up. Drive to work – charge at work. Drive to gym/cinema/whatever – charge there. Drive to supermarket – charge there.

The supermarkets in particular sell most of the fuel in this country, at (or often below) cost price to attract people to do their shopping. Do you really think they’ll give up on that concept as everything electrifies? You’ll see supermarket carparks flooded with chargers within the decade, and discount rate charging if you spend £20 in store just like they do with petrol now.

A modern EV supermini with 200+ miles range will need a topup less than once a week to do average mileage. Just do it while you’re doing something else.

A ‘dirty’ 20 year old ICE maintained to give an extra 10 years and 100k miles is far better than Tesla building a new 3 for you.

Not according to the folks on the EV thread.

The biggest barrier to EV’s is not being able to charge at home. Approximately 33% of households have no off street parking and some of those that do won’t have a suitable space to fit a charger next to. Does anyone actually believe that whatever flavour of government will effectively tell these people they’re going to drastically reduce their ability to travel?

No they’ll just get councils to install on-street chargers (already happening) or they’ll use public chargers like you do for petrol.

A ‘dirty’ 20 year old ICE maintained to give an extra 10 years

How many folk you know driving 30 year old cars

There’s a reason for that and it’s not simply the cost.

I tend to buy a car outright for £3k and then run it for as long as possible until its not longer economically viable or has died. I’m intrigued to see how it’ll play out with EV’s and whether there will reach a point where they’ll become affordable for the mainstream.

Yep – somebody is going to have to come up with an amazing subsidy scheme before I’m even close to spending on a relatively new EV.

somebody is going to have to come up with an amazing subsidy scheme before I’m even close to spending on a relatively new EV.

But it’s cheaper than the alternative they say

whether there will reach a point where they’ll become affordable for the mainstream.

Well there’s a few things to consider:

1. Industry analysts have long said that when batteries reach £100/kWh the cars will cost the same as petrol. It’s currently £137; in 2010 it was £1,000. So we’re basically there already. And the cars are selling faster than ever so as production ramps up they’ll only get cheaper.

2. If the price continues to fall below £100 then EVs may well end up cheaper than ICEs. Of course, supply of battery materials may not hold up, however the number of technological advancements queueing up to be productionised is pretty big.

3. To mask the high cost of batteries manufacturers (starting with Tesla) design their EVs as premium cars and throw loads of tech and design at them. This makes people want them enough to pay those prices. However, at those prices they are selling as fast as they can make them, so they won’t get any cheaper for a few years. They’ll keep prices as high as they can and keep the cars as premium as they can for as long as they can to make cash and fund investment in production for the time they know is coming – when they need to start making actual cheap EVs. They won’t have a 300 mile range, 350kW charging or luxury interiors; but they’ll have a 150 mile range and be £15k new probably.

4. The upcoming bans will force the issue anyway, so they’ll need to make as much cash from the premium market as they can before 2030 when the need to start making cheap cars again.

the average life expectancy of a car is now only around 10 years

Anyone able to verify this? I searched and didn’t find it. Did find an article claiming the current average age of a car is 8.5 which is quite different.

So, 2030 for “cheap” cars and then another 10 years before the cheap cars star to become affordable second hand, and even then they’ll be limited to 150 miles?

Aye. Right.

This says that VW are making a 20,000 € car with a 180 mile ish range by 2025. And fast charging. That’s the sort of thing I was thinking of.

https://insideevs.com/news/531195/volkswagen-meb-small-platform/

You have to understand that a 150 mile range car doesn’t mean you can only go on a 150 mile trip.

And how will bangernomics work…

It wont. We’ll all be roped into PCP loops for batteries….

The 1000 quid car will vanish pushing costs onto the least fiscally stable

By 2040 the whole idea of personally-owned car transportation will be an almost forgotten memory.

Humanity will have switched en-masse from choking their cities with cars, to getting everywhere by bike, or on foot, or on public transport.

Exoskeletons for the physically frail will be commonplace, and so everyone will be able to cycle.

With this flowering of the bicycle not only will congestion and pollution become a thing of the past, but overall physical health, mental well-being and happiness will achieve previously unimagined heights, powering a new worldwide renaissance of the sciences, philosophy, the arts, justice, tolerance and understanding. Name one politician who has declared war after *cycling* to work?

Rapid advances in technology and global collaboration will lead to the development of cheap, safe nuclear fusion and planning will start for the first serious steps in the colonisation of the inner planets and the asteroid belt.

That will be when the first of the comets hits. The first one, the small one, stuns humanity into action, seeing the creation of the largest rescue effort and humanitarian aid effort in human history.

The second one though. That finishes us.

Do cockroaches need a car?

Since a significant proportion of the CO2 and environmental damage produced by vehicle is produced during it’s manufacture, including the mining of rare earth minerals for batteries, it is probably more environmentally friendly to keep an older petrol car on the road (that’s already been manufactured) than to scrap it and replace it with a new electric vehicle. Hence the sensible thing to do would be a slow phase out, allowing previously manufactured vehicles to be used until worn out.

I must be one of the dinosaurs on here but I love my 3.0 6 cyl Z4 , it goes so good and sound fantastic but seeing as I’m almost 60 yet never smoked in my live I don’t feel too bad. All these folk who have flown for years many times a year , the amount of campervan blocking the roads etc
I might give it up in ten years time

We could have a massive demolition derby.

Or what cranker said 👆

the average life expectancy of a car is now only around 10 years

as ‘old’ cars become less popular it becomes self fulfilling because they’re not ‘worth’ repairing from a financial point of view.

That’s the opposite to what’s currently happening. My first car in 1990 was 12 years old and was on its last legs. My current 9 year car seems to have loads of life left. It’s common to see 20 year old cars. According to https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-8739771/Britons-keeping-cars-longer-says-new-report.html from a year ago (so pre-covid) there were 6 million cars over 13 years old – 5 times as many as in 1994.

It’s great that we’re phasing out ICE cars, but there will need to be some effort put in to get the older cars off the road in a way that doesn’t disadvantage those who can’t afford a new car.

The world will be pretty **** up by 2045

Judging from many of the ages of members previously posted, I don’t think what happens in 2045 is going to be that much of a problem for them 😉
.
They’ll have been combusted themselves by then 😆

We have 3 ICE vehicles in the driveway. Average age is 13 years. We have no plans to replace any of them and expect to have the same 3 for at least the next 5 years.

Anyone able to verify this? I searched and didn’t find it. Did find an article claiming the current average age of a car is 8.5 which is quite different.

there’s a big difference (approximately double) between the average age of a car on the road and the average age at which they’re scrapped. 8.5 years is probably about right for the former.

I tend to buy a car outright for £3k and then run it for as long as possible until its not longer economically viable or has died. I’m intrigued to see how it’ll play out with EV’s and whether there will reach a point where they’ll become affordable for the mainstream.

if you have somewhere to charge they’re probably already there, albeit with compromises. You can get a leaf for £5k, which costs at least £1k less to fuel, per year, than your £3k car (assuming a normal-ish amount of driving). the break even is then 2 years, and if ‘as long as possible’ is normally longer than that (I’d assume 5 years ish), the electric car is already cheaper.

The downside is that car has fairly limited range (maybe 80 miles or so).. but you can imagine the pattern repeating in future years.

The 1000 quid car will vanish pushing costs onto the least fiscally stable

But this is not necessarily a bad thing. £1,000 cars are too cheap, people literally buy them as disposable items. People are not fixing cars because they are cheap, there are too many of them, and they are ‘not worth fixing’ because they’re too cheap. Restrict supply, and suddenly they are worth fixing after all.

Those people who can’t afford £3/4k or whatever it ends up being will have to get to work somehow, so they’ll need PT or bikes. And PT will have to get better. The car market will completely change in 20 years and that means how we own and use them will change too.

Will converting existing ICE cars to full EV become a more common thing? Is it ever going to be sensible or economical? Is it much better if at all for CO2 emissions than building a whole new car? I suspect the downfall of this path is that there are so many different shapes and models.

Why is it that in any thread discussing the future someone will make the assertion that the world will be some sort of dystopian nightmare in x number of years?

I’ve been hearing this sort of nonsense for as long as I can remember, yet I see no evidence that life in general is any worse than it was 10, 20 or even 40 years ago.

JP