EVs will not drive the kind of oil distribution market retraction you're describing until they're at least 10% of cars on the road, which would be years and years after they're 10% of new cars sold.
So while I agree the affect you describe will help, we don't have time to wait for it.
I don't yet have a guess what percentage of the car fleet needs to be EV for that to happen, but that number is also not the only potential disruption that may happen to cause it (again, we have the 70s Oil crises as examples).
(Not that causing an Oil crisis is necessarily the right way to combat climate change, but in the question of chicken-and-egg between ICE and EV, people sure have a short memory for how volatile Oil is.)
Manufacturing in China could bring the cost down significantly, with lower wages, taxes, material costs, etc.
Software companies can afford the higher labor cost in the bay area because they tend to have really large margin when they win. Car companies have very very low margins, even when they win, so they really need to pay attention to things like labor cost. This is a huge mistep for Tesla and shows poor judgement on Elon Musk or whoever decided to do it in Fremont.
A genius no doubt. I will see you all on Mars.
In the long run, I'd agree, the expense vs. reward calculation doesn't make sense now. But GM and Toyota successfully used that plant for something like 30-50 years before that and there was a whole community of auto workers living around it, so I'm not sure I'd say that was poor judgment for them at all.
Nobody expected housing prices to go up 100%+ over the last few years. 2010-2015ish was a real estate boom period for Valley workers if anything. You had post-recession housing fire sales; AirBnB wasn't big enough yet to incentivize empty houses; Google, Apple and FB didn't quite own the entire Menlo Park->Sunnyvale corridor yet; etc. Good times.
The Chevy Bolt and to a lesser extent the Model 3 have already hit the "Corolla/Civic/Sonata/et al" sedan sweet spot for new sales. The mean in new car sales has always been around and just above $30k. Certainly the mean in total car sales is closer to $20k, but that hugely because of the secondary market and fast depreciation (used car sales). It's still too early to tell what sort of impact models like the Bolt and Model 3 may have on used sales (and obviously production numbers are still a factor, especially with Tesla's production and delivery woes).
Chinese manufacturers have been exploring the "bottom" of the EV market much more effectively than the US and EU markets simply because they don't need the carrot of luxury to attract early adopters in quite the same way. If Chinese EV companies are to be believed, hitting below that magic USD$20k mean is possible with new car sales alone due to EV supply chain efficiencies that ICE supply chains can't match.
> self driving makes this a nirvana
I feel self-driving is a red herring/impossible goal like the 60s AI boom all over again, and we're all going to look back on this in a decade or so and wonder what everyone was thinking.
Also, ride sharing isn't likely the answer in current America. It's enough of a culture shift to get gas-lovers/petrolheads to enjoy/love/trust EVs. It's even more of an ask to remove ownership from the question and to force them to only ever rent a car. We might not have time to take only one hurdle at a time, but we may have to.
GM sold 18,000 Bolts in 2018 [1]. Over the same period, Toyota sold 280,000 Corolla Sedans [2].
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/3/18166619/gm-ev-tax-credit-...
[2] http://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-data/toyota/toyota-coro...
Do you think it's possible that all we need is ~$100/KWh, after which due to diminishing returns, find better ROI improving other areas like a dramatically cheaper wiring harness?
IMHO privately owned electric vehicles will only ever have been a historical oddity of the transition between personally owned cars and shared/pooled cars.
li-ion batteries have done an excellent job walking down the learning/cost curve, but we can all see the way it bends and how much headroom is left in the chemistry. we'll likely hit $100/kwh in the next few years, but even just $80/kwh is likely 5+ years away after that. the model 3 will never start with a $2.
so if you're going to bottom out at around 3x the price it would take to fully replace the existing market... then you have to figure out a way to get 3x+ the value out of the asset you're delivering.
that means some combination of lasting 3x longer (~500k miles) and/or being in use 3x more (~600hrs/year). the former is viably unlocked by the EV engineering advantages, but w/r/t the latter, individual drivers have no intention of tripling their car usage. so it simply has to be turned into some kind of shared asset.
imho self driving makes this a nirvanna, so I'm glad they're pursuing it, but its not actually required. tesla could add a basic uber/lyft feature set to their existing app and then when the last 0.01% of self driving winds up taking years longer than elon said it would he can blame the regulators and just make it a regular human-driver ride sharing app.
remember the mission is the end of carbon emissions, so any plan for "lets just get good market share and margins in the luxury segment" is a plan to fail.