Business

Elon Musk Predicts “The End” of gasoline cars

Published

2 years ago

September 13, 2022

Elon Musk undoubtedly has helped change the face of the automobile industry..

In less than 20 years, Tesla (TSLA) , which he co-founded, has become the benchmark for what all other carmakers aspire to and compare themselves with.

Legacy carmakers like Ford (F) , General Motors (GM) and Volkswagen (VLKAF) have made Tesla and its charismatic and whimsical chief executive their main rival.

Startups like Rivian (RIVN) and Lucid (LCID) want a hand in the situation by disrupting the disruptor-in-chief that is Musk and the company he leads. Ambitious Chinese manufacturers NIO (NIO) and BYD (BYDDY) know they must beat Tesla to dominate the highly lucrative local green vehicle market.

Musk’s fans will tell you that the present and the future of the auto is Tesla. Many investors seem to agree, judging by the Austin company’s market capitalization — $954 billion at last check, again approaching the prominent threshold of $1 trillion. Last October Tesla became the first car manufacturer to exceed a market value of $1 trillion.

For comparison, Volkswagen and Toyota (TM) , the world’s two largest automakers by sales volumes, have market values of $100 billion and $200 billion respectively.

Musk Writes the Obit for Gasoline Cars
Ford’s market capitalization is $62.4 billion and GM’s is $61.3 billion. The two American manufacturers nevertheless sell several million vehicles a year, compared with barely 1 million units in 2021 for Tesla. The EV leader is currently the world’s sixth largest company based on valuation, just behind Apple (AAPL) , Saudi Aramco, Microsoft (MSFT) , Alphabet (GOOGL) and Amazon (AMZN) .

This market confidence in Tesla stems from the financial community’s view of the company as the EV-market leader at a time when environmental issues have become a key priority in many countries.

Tesla also seems to have a head start on autonomous technologies, with its full-self-driving driver-assistance system, which is designed to enable vehicles to drive themselves. Full-self-driving hasn’t reached that point just yet — but Tesla’s relatively rapid rise to prominence and overall market position give Musk the credibility and standing to predict how the auto industry will develop.

And the serial entrepreneur just predicted the imminent death of gasoline vehicles.

“Won’t be long before we view gasoline cars the same way we view steam engines today,” the world’s richest man said on Twitter on Sept. 12.

Won’t be long before we view gasoline cars the same way we view steam engines today
— Naughtius Maximus (@elonmusk) September 12, 2022

In less than 24 hours, the tweet had received more than 142,000 likes.

Two hours after this dark prediction, the billionaire sent another message, putting another nail in gasoline cars’ coffin.

“The residual value of gasoline cars bought today will be much lower than people think,” Musk added.

The residual value of gasoline cars bought today will be much lower than people think
— Naughtius Maximus (@elonmusk) September 12, 2022

The many comments that these two posts prompted make clear that many users of the Twitter network share the tycoon’s opinion.

“The final destination of gasoline cars 😩,” commented one Twitter user.

“But it should be because of competition in a free market, not gov’t coercion,” said another user

“Once electric cars are commonly accepted, I believe the value of gasoline cars will plummet,” one user argued