Disruption: how the horses disappeared in 13 years.

Melbourne Herald Sun, Thursday September 10, 2015

The PowerPoint slide shows New York's 5th Avenue packed with horse cabs and carriages. Stanford University lecturer Tony Seba asks the audience to look closely at this shot from Easter 1900. "Where's the car?" he asks. None can be seen till Seba points to a blurry form that you eventually see is a horseless carriage.

"Now here is 5th Avenue, Easter 1913." This time the street is filled with automobiles and some buses and trucks. "Where's the horse?" he asks. There is none to be seen.

"To go from all horse to all cars took about 13 years," said Seba, "That's history, that's disruption."

In the past decade you're seen such a disruption. Where's your Instamatic? Where's the world's greatest photographic film company? Fragmented and sold, the giant of your childhood, Kodak, is long gone.

Seba's talk asks us to see that such a disruption is happening right now - and by 2030, just 15 years from now, our world will be completely changed. "Transport and energy will be nothing like we have today." He has the facts and data to back him up.

He points to electric vehicles. The current Tesla P85D has been judged by motoring experts as "The best car Consumer Reports has ever tested", equivalent in acceleration and handling with the Porsche Carrera 911. And similarly expensive.

But the fall in the cost of batteries is rapid; the intensity of research and design of new EVs, not just by Tesla but all the major car makers, is such that he confidently predicts prices will fall below $50,000: for a car that's as good as a Porsche, by 2018.

Then he points to solar panels, which have plummeted in price. His charts show them falling a further two-thirds by 2020, quite apart from their rapidly increasing efficiency.

You know all this talk of rising energy costs? They won't worry you because you'll make your own electricity. Oh and your electric car can fill its "tank" with 300 kilometres' energy for $8.

Here in Melbourne there's research at Monash University's Nanoscale Science Lab that's creating super-capacitors which can give batteries much greater capacity and faster charging to expand the range of EVs even further.

Stretching amazement further he reminds us that self-drive vehicles are almost here. They can now gauge distances and speeds on the road, self-park, observe traffic. Already several manufacturers are creating cars that drive themselves and use ACC - Adaptive Cruise Control - which makes them far more controlled and accurate than you could ever be. So yes, your car will be a better driver than you.

With this computer control they can communicate with each other and drive much tighter formations, observing lanes and pedestrians. So eventually we'll need less space, less roads. No more need to expand highways - there will be plenty of room. Can you imagine how much that could save?

As it is, right now all the research and development is producing technical and price competition that are pulling costs down.

Seba raises several more facts, and has written books on the subject, but the end message is simple. We are now in a period of historic disruption that by 2030 will have disposed of the need for petrol, gas, or coal. Looking back, that's the time between now and 2000 millennium. Wasn't so long ago was it?

If you think I'm exaggerating, judge for yourself: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBkND76J91k .