Wednesday, July 8, 2009

What Peak Oil means for classic cars and new cars

I happened to be in an interesting presentation by Daniele Ganser yesterday. He presented his views and thoughts around "Peak Oil". Basically this is about the facts that oil is only available in finite quantities and that the largest volumes have been discovered already while consumption still increases. There will be a peak in oil production in the foreseeable future (some say 2010, some later, some earlier) and then the prices will increase and the amount we can consume must decrease. Of course we all have known this for quite some times, but we tend to forget. There's a lot of nasty business around this problem, and there are wars and propaganda battles. But whatever we do, oil will not last forever and we need to preserve what we still have for what we most urgently need it for.
As a classic car owner of course I need gasoline for my hobby and while I am willing to pay more for it as it doesn't matter that much in the overall cost of my hobby it can become difficult to justify let's say 5-10 Euro per liter of gasoline. But it would be even worse to not being able to drive the cars any more and I am pretty sure it would help to increase the value of the cars.
Very different is the picture for car manufacturers of new cars and their buyers. Let's accept the facts and start to produce cars that weigh rather 500 kg than 1.5 ton and consume much less than 5 liters per 100 km. Let's build electrical cars as soon as the battery technology is both economical and ecological and hybrid cars to combine the two things. I have posted a lot on what can be done. And for the politicians - let's bet on alternative fuels and energy sources.
Overall, let's be intelligent and clever about this and think for future generations too. And keep history and tradition - classic cars are part of this - in mind too.

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