Energy & Transportation disruptions : Impact on Indian companies

– What will happen to the existing battery manufacturing companies ? Can Tesla Battery throw them all out ?
Batteries are being developed by all and sundry, Tesla , Research universities as well as the Japanese. So like atom bomb or the calculus, a lot of people would hit a breakthrough around the same time.

• Electric Vehicles will have 100x fewer moving parts than today’s gas based ones”, which will put some of the auto-ancillary companies out of business
  It’ll be a slow death, since battery technology would have a evolution rather than revolution. Even then there are lots of places & Industry where internal combustion engine would be to be present, viz. Mining & Pakistan (or Bihar).. So people will have lots of warning.

• Which conventional energy companies will be most impacted by Solar power disruption ?
  The nuclear power industry & it’s manufacturers would be the first casualty of plentiful (if not necessarily cheap) solar power. As a side note, Saudi Arabia, Libya & Egypt & neighbours would be greatest beneficiary.

• With new business models like “Car-as-a-service”, they may be far fewer cars bought in future and how would that impact all car manufacturers?
  It seems to me that people .. sorry MEN get a car (or any vehicle be it an animal) to move. They like to own the thing not for the utility but for the assurance that they can move without somebody else’s help. Even now, Uber is making it quite cheap & easy to move around, yet nobody thinks of examining the economics and evaluating if their locomotion needs can be fulfilled without them owning a car.

• With self-driving cars, what kind of technology companies will emerge as the leaders ?
  The companies that make cars duh. As for who’ll have the technology, you can’t say. It can come from evolution or revolution, unlike batteries here algorithms matter more and somebody could get that in his dream.

The reason auto companies are not investing & focussing in self-driving technology is because they see it as a computing problem, not a transportation problem. As and when their customers demand self-driving technology, they’ll license it from Google/Apple/MS/Whoever has the tech.