Are ICEs moving to CRTs?
Most of our readers are probably old enough to remember the days when CRT TVs and computer monitors were often seen sitting by curbs, abandoned by consumers who upgraded to new and improved flat screen technologies. To our younger readers: A CRT video display had a convex glass screen, it was thinner in the back and deeper than it was wide, and it usually had a few knobs on the front.
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Above: A look at the abandoned CRT TV on the side of the road (Flickr: Anthony Albright)
For a few years, CRTs littered driveways and dumps around the world, and you may have felt sorry for the unwelcome and obnoxious, poor little things, sitting outside in the rain, after so many years of loyal service. But it was CRT day. The first were manufactured in the 1930s, and by the mid-1990s, about 160 million were sold each year. In the 2000s, the price of flat-panel displays declined steadily, and at a certain point, the market for CRT displays disappeared almost overnight. The last known creator of the CRT left Ghost in 2015.
New technology replaces the old one all the time, but rarely in history have we seen an old technology become useless in such a short time. There is usually a year-long transition period during which vintage goods are traded at flea markets and eBay, and often obsolete products hang around in certain economic or geographic locations for decades (incandescent lightbulbs are still on sale at dollar stores). Huh). This did not happen with CRT. Flat panels were better in every way, and once they became cheaper than CRTs, the latter’s resale value quickly dropped to zero.
Could something similar happen with internal-combustion-engine (ICE) vehicles? Certainly, once electric vehicles reach price parity, which is expected to happen in the next few years, it will be extremely difficult to make a case for buying fossil-fuel burners. Who would want to accept higher operating costs, lower performance, less interior space and more noise, while helping to fund air pollution, climate change, war and genocide?
And there may be an even bigger killer app coming down the road: the opportunity to actually earn income from your vehicle. Driverless robotaxis and/or vehicle-to-grid applications will transform cars from a money pit to a revenue generator. It’s anyone’s guess when these innovations will catch on, but they are both game-changers. If you can afford a new EV, and use it to earn enough income to pay for all or part of your car, pay for fuel, insurance, and maintenance to put on the gas-burner. It would be madness to continue.
So, when are we going to start seeing rows of abandoned SUVs and pickups burning with dinosaurs rustling along the roads? Well, as much as some of us would like to get into an automotive shadenfreudeThere are actually many differences between ICE and CRT.
At first, transitioning to a new video technology was easy for everyone. Typically, the manufacturers of CRTs were the same companies that developed flat screens, and continue to sell them today. They had little to worry about with stranded assets, and thus little motivation for customers to try to buy the CRT. Similarly, for consumers, there was no learning curve involved in replacing their CRT with a flat-screen one—just better picture quality and more desk space. Once the better technology became affordable, there was no reason for sellers or buyers to stick to the old one.
This is far from the case when it comes to automobiles. Electrification is forcing a total restructuring of the industry—automakers are redesigning factories, laying off entire classes of workers and scrambling to hire others, to create new supply chains. are rushing, and facing the fact that large areas of their business model (dealership, maintenance) may be superfluous. The need for billions in investment is obvious, and the potential for profit is next to nothing.
Furthermore, the transition to EVs has been led, and will continue to be, for the foreseeable future, by a company that didn’t exist 20 years ago. As legacy automakers struggle to crack even on their EV sales, Tesla is earning massive margins, and innovating at a pace that can’t match the old guard. Rather than fighting a losing battle to “catch up” to Tesla, more backward-looking auto execs are more willing to try to spin their ICE sales for as long as they can.
Another small difference between video screens and cars is that the former are all powered by the same electricity (they also use the same power cables). The advent of EVs means the end of the oil age, and global oil companies are the richest and most powerful entities to exist in human history – more powerful than any automaker or any government. They are not sitting idly by watching their business model disappear. On the contrary, they are buying out politicians, spreading misinformation in every form of media, and even developing whole new industries (hydrogen, carbon capture, plastics) to ensure that their Demand for the products remained strong.
Unlike the transition from one type of video screen to another, the transition to electrified transportation will be one of the biggest technological changes in history, and it is already impacting every sphere of human endeavor—economic, geopolitical, Military, environmental, social – whatever you say. There are many groups that have strong reasons for keeping gas-burning vehicles, some with little to no affiliation with the oil or automotive industries.
The genes don’t go back to the bottoms, and new technology will win out in the end, but enemies of the future are sure to put up a long and resolute rear-guard battle. So, while the analogy between CRT and ICE is a fun one, it is highly unlikely to be proven accurate. The transition to EV will be long, gradual, uneven and painful for many people.
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written by: Charles Morris
was published
Big Auto, Big Oil, Electric Vehicles, Tesla, Tesla News, TSLA
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