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As I got up to address the Castrol management team this morning, I was surrounded by these huge blown-up posters on every wall. The inside joke is that the date on the magazine is 1994.

Castrol is singularly focused on lubricants for internal combustion engines (ICE), selling $10 billion of black gold per year.

Well, I had to tell them that it’s all going to end. Not a question of if, but when. Planes, trains and automobiles will ice the ICE. Electric motors do not need an oil change.

In the future, when all vehicles are electric, we will look back to the current era and marvel that there were a billion oil-burners driving around the planet wasting 80% of their energy as heat and applying only 0.3% of that energy to moving the passenger. We will look at our oil reservoir of long-chain hydrocarbons like we do the Amazon forest, a treasure trove of raw materials, and shake our head: they just burned it?... What an uncreative use of that rich resource. Currently 90% of organic chemicals come from petroleum and natural gas.

Of course, they thought EVs would eventually make a difference, in the distant foggy future.

I countered that there are already 120 million EVs driving around China today… manufactured by 1,300 different companies. EVs have been the best selling powered vehicle category in China since 2007.

What?

I am referring to two-wheel vehicles (E2Ws - scooters and eBikes). From those economies of scale, the four largest vendors of E2Ws are starting to sell cheap $3K cars using similar technology (brushless motors and VRLA batteries). For the Chinese buyer, the total cost of operation is less than public transportation on buses, and affords greater flexibility and psychologically, less SARS fears. And of course, the government is proactively driving the conversion, with bans on gas motorcycles in 150 cities.