Opinion/Editorial

EVENTUALITIES, NOT PREDICTIONS

1- Auto repair shops will disappear, almost overnight.

2- A petrol/diesel engine has 20,000 individual parts, while an electric motor has twenty.  Electric cars are sold with lifetime guarantees and are repaired only by dealers. It will take only ten minutes to remove and replace an electric motor.

3- Faulty automotive electric motors will not be repaired in the dealership but will be sent to a regional repair shop that repairs them using only robots.

4- Your electric motor malfunction light goes on, so you drive up to what looks like a car wash, and your car is towed through while you have a cup of coffee, then your car comes out on the other side with a new electric motor or component.

5- Petrol pumps will go away, almost entirely.

6 – Almost all street corners will have meters that dispense electricity.

7 – The “coal industries” will go away, oil too…goodbye to the Middle East.

8- Homes will produce and store more electrical energy during the day than they use.  It will be sold back to the grid to be sent to larger users and companies.

9- Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later you might never take pictures on film again? With today’s smart phones, who even owns a camera anymore?

10- Uber is just a software tool, (they don’t own any cars), but are now the biggest taxi company in the world.

11- Air-BnB is now the largest hotel company in the world (they don’t own any properties).

12- Facebook now has ‘face recognition’ software that can recognize faces better than humans. Get ready to be recognized by name at almost every public place on earth one day very soon.

13- In 2018 the first self-driving cars were already here. In the next few years, the entire auto industry will start to be disrupted. You won’t want to own a car any more at all, as you will call up a car with your phone, it will show up at your location, and then drive you to your destination. Then it will leave to serve someone else.

14- You will not need to park it. You will pay only for the ‘driven distance’ and you can be productive while driving. The very young children of today will never get a driver’s license and they will never own a car.

15- This will change all cities because they will have 90% to 95% fewer cars. Former parking spaces will be turned into green city parks.

16- About 1.2 million people die each year in car accidents (worldwide). There is currently one accident every 60,000 miles driven.  However, with autonomous driving, that will drop to 1 accident in every 6 million miles. That will save million-plus lives, worldwide, each year.

1 – Many engineers from Volkswagen and Audi are completely terrified of Tesla. Look at all the companies offering all-electric vehicles, which was unheard of, only a few years ago.

18– Auto insurance companies will have massive trouble too because, without accidents, the costs of auto insurance will sink to nothing.

19- Real estate will change, because if you can work while you commute, or you can work from your home, people will abandon towers and offices to move to more beautiful, quieter, and more affordable properties to do their work in.

20- Electric cars will become mainstream by about 2030. Cities will be less noisy because all new cars and trucks will run only on electricity.

21- Solar production has been on an exponential upward curve for 30 years, but you can now see the burgeoning impact, and it’s just starting to get ramped up.  It, and wind power, will overcome all other energy sources.

22- The Tricorder X medical machine will be announced this year. It works with a special cell phone, which takes a retina scan, a tiny sample blood, blood pressure, and then has a subject breathe into it.  It analyses 54 bio-markers that identify nearly any disease or even injury you might be inflicted with or have.

23- Police agencies will plummet in importance and personnel, as eighty percent of all police-citizen contact takes place due to automobile accidents or violations.

Goodbye to most large police departments and agencies.

24- The Coronavirus will pass but the changes in behavior enforced and learned by the public will be here for the rest of everyone’s lives.  Human reproduction will plummet.  Immigration will be welcomed, and eventually rewarded.  Jobs will become much higher paid and working will, once again, be seen as something of great additive value to the culture.

~~James Strauss

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