I predict a bifurcated market: Cars wind up as electric while light trucks (and their large SUV brethren) stick to fossil fuels.

A car payment is maybe $200/month. Car insurance is maybe $100/month. 12,000 miles/year at 30MPG and $2/gallon is $67/month.

~$1.20 of the $2/gallon is taxes, refining, distribution and marketing.

So if the market price of crude oil falls by 75%, its contribution to a gallon of gas goes from $.80 to $.20. That's $20/month difference, or ~5% of the cost of operating a car.

And that's assuming crude prices actually fall by that much, and that governments don't raise the fuel tax to make up revenue and/or fight climate change. It's not hard to imagine adding $.49/gallon to the gas tax.

And most governments, including most of the high population US states, don't have any domestic oil industry to speak of.

According to this article, gasoline would have to be very cheap in order to compete with the cost of electricity. At one point the marginal difference probably doesn't matter.

The value of human labor has been steadily declining for decades; driving down the political power of laborers.

Self driving trucks & taxis, delivery drones, robots, I don't even. https://vimeo.com/190609870

Our society is going to undergo a dramatic shift.

Yes, technology has created new jobs, but it has also massively devalued it; a highschool graduate can no longer support a family at a lifelong factory job.

It's worth keeping in mind that this was only ever true for a large number of people in a very short window in history, basically a few decades in the middle of the 20th century. Before that, you had (essentially subsistence) farming, craftsmen (neither of which could be done without substantial apprenticeship, ie education) or sweatshop factory working (which did not allow for the kind of middle class supporting a family you have in mind).

I met someone who's been with a company for nearly 30 years. When they started, everyone got 15 vacation and 12 personal leave days a year.

It's unthinkable now. Why?

Apartment landlords are coming around, quickly, though - it's a selling point and not all that expensive to install a few 240V outlets in the garage.

If you CAN charge overnight, waking up to a full 'tank' every morning is amazing! It's a surprising benefit that isn't immediately obvious to the new EV driver.

That's true now, but may not be so in a few years if aluminum-air battery technology continues to improve. Aluminum-air batteries have much higher energy density than lithium ion, but they cannot be electrically recharged [1] so when they are out you have to swap them.

The idea is that you build car with both a small lithium ion system and a large aluminum-air system. Lithium ion has higher power output, so you want that to actually drive the vehicle. You use the aluminum-air to recharge the lithium ion, to extend the range.

Current experiments with this approach add about 1200 miles to the range of the car compared to a pure lithium ion system.

If starting from full on both batteries you got 1400 miles, that would be enough to let a lot of city drivers go a month between having to go have the aluminum-air batter swapped out in the worst case where they are not able to do any plug in charging. That would be quite feasible for many people, assuming that there was a battery swap place within reasonable distance.

[1] In other words, you cannot recharged them by forcing a reverse current through them like you do normal rechargeable batteries. They essentially have to be rebuilt with new anodes, and the old anodes become scrap for recycling.

While I'd like to leave the driving to Otto most of the time, sometimes I really like to drive myself, and would miss it.

I like my drag racing manual transmission and clutch, it's a heluva lot of fun to drive on the open road, but it's agony in heavy city traffic. (The engine just will not run at low speeds, the clutch is very grabby :) It can be really hard to get moving uphill from a standstill without rotating the tires in place a few times.)

A much more likely scenario is that safety features, starting with AEB collision avoidance, will become mandatory.

This will progress to the point where autopilot will always be running in a supervisory role, ready to take over in an instant if you're doing something dumb that could harm yourself or others.