As a metaphor, a cyclist being run over by someone driving an electric vehicle (EV) is hard to beat. It's long been clear self-driving cars, such as Tesla (TSLA) which is effectively on sale already, could be dangerous to other road users.
Forecast EV demand is already driving demand for battery materials, with lithium and cobalt in a second boom phase since 2014 and copper riding high on both Covid-19 recovery demand and electrification hopes in the medium and long term.
But a future of semi-automated Teslas replacing smoke-billowing clunkers does not scream paradise to me.
Everyone who rides regularly in London has a mental list of which drivers are most likely to kill them. For me, top of the list for a long time was anyone driving for a taxi app, usually in a Toyota Prius.
Now there is a new champion: men and women at the wheel of Teslas. I’ve had several near-misses where Tesla drivers come within centimetres of me. One even hit me with the side of his Model X after I told him what I thought of him for sitting an inch behind me on a narrow street. Other people who ride regularly have had similar experiences. The Highway Code says people on bikes should be passed at the same distance you would pass another car.
Scaring cyclists is obviously not going to affect Tesla’s EV dominance but drivers dying might.
Last week, two men died when their Tesla hit a tree. Usually I’d be careful to talk about the ‘driver’ hitting something or someone, rather than ‘a car’, to make clear drivers always bear responsibility for where their vehicle is pointing, but that’s not possible in this case.
No one was in the driver’s seat, according to police.
Not having someone at the wheel goes against Tesla’s advice, but the system clearly allowed it. The company is also providing customers with ‘full self-driving’ software, although this is currently only available as a beta release, meaning it is not yet the finished product.
A recent video by a YouTuber driving around Oakland in the US shows full self-driving is laughably bad at best and could be fatal at worst. Even at low speeds, the car lurches around and makes bad decisions, requiring the driver to take over.
For the world’s most valuable carmaker this is a crisis waiting to happen.
I asked a friend who has recently got a Model 3 why Tesla drivers were so intent on taking the worst driver crown. He said the Model 3 shows you everything in your surroundings, generating a picture of other cars, pedestrians and cyclists on the car’s large screen. The theory is that seeing everything on a screen means normal judgements made while driving go out the window.
This leaves us in a dicey automated driving halfway house. The cars are promising a kind of driving 2.0, where the vehicle takes care of the annoying tasks like keeping your eyes on the road but is far from ready to actually drive itself.
A study from a few years ago showed a third of London car trips were under 2km. This shows there is massive room for people to change their habits, perhaps even driven by more working from home, as one parent doesn't have to ferry two kids to school 2 miles apart while the other heads to work.
An individual's climate footprint is clearly minute compared with a big industrial company, but it is worth reflecting on where this energy transition is taking us.
There just seems to be a massive gap between the clean, green, future being painted by forecasts saying 28 per cent of vehicle sales will be EVs by 2030 (per Macquarie Bank) and the experience on the roads. I feel much safer pedalling along surrounded by diesel-spewing clunkers than Model 3s or God forbid the massive new Cybertruck, even if my lungs are being filled with rubbish.
