A seismic trend for your radar… Say goodbye to parking lots… Why your future self won’t drive a car… In the mailbag: “People are going hungry, and you’re worried about pot!”…
That’s how Legacy Research cofounder Doug Casey describes the electric vehicle (EV) revolution… because it’s going to turn our world upside down.
There’s a lot you probably already know about this megatrend. But to catch you up real quick…
EVs don’t burn gasoline in an internal combustion engine like regular cars and trucks. Instead, they run on rechargeable batteries that hold a charge thanks to metals such as lithium, graphite, nickel, manganese, and cobalt.
Today, there are close to 1.9 million EVs on the roads. That number is expected to reach 13 million over the next two years. And by 2030, we’re on track to hit 125 million.
And as Doug has been telling readers, it’s going to shake up everything from the auto-insurance industry… to the price of real estate… to car ownership culture.
We started covering this megatrend here at Legacy Research in 2017.
And we had such high conviction that it was going to be a trend to watch, we even launched a new advisory around this idea – The Near Future Report.
Silicon Valley insider Jeff Brown, who heads up the letter, is bullish on the digital technologies behind electric and self-driving vehicles.
It’s one of the reasons he’s recommended companies that make the specialized chips needed for autonomous driving… as well as the companies building out the 5G mobile data network needed to move vast amounts of data to and from self-driving vehicles.
But Dave’s a commodities guy. And he’s taken a different approach from Jeff. He’s interested in the battery metals that will power the EV revolution.
As Dave’s been telling his readers, the rechargeable battery industry is expected to grow by 32% a year for the next decade. And that’s all going to be driven by metals dug out of the ground.
It’s not easy to find pure plays on battery metals. But Dave recently told our Casey Daily Dispatch readers that a simple way to capitalize on this trend is the Global X Lithium & Battery Tech Fund (LIT).
It invests in a broad basket of companies involved in lithium mining, lithium refining, and battery production.
As with any megatrend, the switch to EVs is going to have unexpected consequences.
And these consequences are going to be huge… just as they were when the gasoline engine revolutionized transportation in the early 20th century.
Here’s Doug with more…
There’s a famous picture that was taken of 5th Avenue in 1901. The whole street is chockablock with horses and buggies. There’s one motorcar in front of a building amongst the mass of horse-drawn vehicles. In 1913 another picture was taken of the exact same place. There’s only one horse and buggy on a street bumper-to-bumper with motor vehicles. Things changed radically in just more than a decade.
Doug believes the same kind of radical change is about to happen again…
I speak as a lifelong car guy. I’ve owned high-performance cars and played with them my whole life – including racing sports cars, stock cars on ovals, and quarter-mile drag racing.
EVs are far superior to internal combustion engine vehicles. They’ve got every possible advantage. They handle better because of a much lower center of gravity. They’re more economical. They’re much faster. Much more quiet. And they’re more reliable because they have vastly fewer moving parts.
Every major car company in the world is going electric, as we speak. Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, and even General Motors and Ford – who tend to lag behind on everything – are all going to EVs. This is really something. It’s a megatrend.
And it goes even deeper than that… because Doug thinks most EVs will be self-driving. And that’s going to blow up the economics of the automobile industry.
That may sound like a radical statement. But consider this…
With self-driving EVs, there’ll be no more need for human Uber and Lyft drivers. You’ll book a ride on the app as normal… but it will whizz to a stop beside you with no driver in the front seat. Then you’ll tell the app where you want to go… and you’ll whizz away to your destination.
That’s certainly convenient. What most folks don’t realize is that it will also slash the number of cars in the world… and completely change our cities and landscapes. Doug again…
The typical car today only spends between 2% and 10% of its life on the road, driving. The rest of the time it’s parked on a street or in a driveway or parking lot.
I suspect most self-driving EVs – at least in cities – will be used like taxis or rented by the hour. They’ll be used 24-7, however, so you’ll need only a fraction of the cars we now have. Self-driving EVs will be much more efficient, and much, much cheaper than the cars we use now.
Because there will be fewer vehicles, and they won’t be sitting in parking lots all the time, there’s going to be a glut of real estate hitting the market. Not sometime in the indefinite future – over the next decade. That goes for a lot of real estate now used for roads as well.
With fewer cars on the road, and fewer accident-prone humans behind the wheel, self-driving EVs will also end the need for the auto-insurance industry and ambulance-chasing lawyers.
And as we’ll show you next week, the EV revolution will also drain revenue from nations that rely heavily on oil exports – in particular, Saudi Arabia and Russia. So stay tuned for more on that.
He reckons our EV future also means you should stay away from Porsches, Ferraris, and other high-end collector’s cars. Doug…
It’s unlikely that I’ll get another Porsche or Ferrari. Cars like that are increasingly pointless with roads being what they are today. Combine that with the effects of the Greater Depression, and in a decade you’ll find exotic cars sitting in barns with flat tires and birds roosting under the hood – which was the case with Duesenberg’s and Cords in the ‘40s and ‘50s.
The current boom in exotic cars selling for $100,000 to $1,000,000 is another bubble about to burst.
Your fellow readers are back again on the hot-button issue of pot legalization. (If you haven’t been keeping up with the back and forth, see what all the fuss is about here.)
It defies reason to conclude that pot is the only drug that causes people to do dumb things. Alcohol was banned by the federal government many years ago. It didn’t take long for people like the Kennedys to start hauling it into this country by the truckload.
The Constitution guarantees life and liberty. Do those against the use of legal pot think that, by prohibiting pot, they are not violating the liberty of others? What else do they want to keep me from doing that doesn’t harm them when I do it?
All of this shows what a primitive species we are. Don’t believe that? Look at how many people are going hungry in the world and you’re worried about pot!
– Dean G.
We, as a free people, ought to be able to put anything in our bodies that we want to, except when doing so would harm others and/or create an undue burden on society. Cannabis should be legal for any U.S. adult to use and to grow, as it has documented health-promoting properties such as eliminating nausea, and the anti-inflammatory properties of Omega-3 fatty acids, to name just two.
– Jerry B.
I suppose if you list a number of famous or successful people who engage in vices or evils that harm the body or the souls of men, that must justify their acts as OK or intelligent to the rest of us. We could get rid of almost every single law known to man with this kind of logic.
You do make a good point that alcohol and other legal substances cause a great deal of ills in our world, but making illegal drugs legal does not improve mankind. It just adds to the growing list of bad ideas, made legal, like killing your own offspring. A society that continues to promote and even legalize immoral behavior eventually corrupts itself into oblivion and self-destructs.
– Bruce B.
Will pot legalization corrupt America? Or are you more interested in the implications of the EV megatrend?
Send your thoughts to [email protected]. We read every email you send.
Until next week…
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Chris Lowe
December 13, 2018
Dublin, Ireland