The two words keeping me awake are 'What if?'

Mudar Patherya wonders if every new vehicle sold in India would be electric by 2030

The two words keeping me awake are ‘What if?’
 

• What if most people stopped buying cars in a decade and a half (prediction that 95 per cent of all US passenger miles travelled will be addressed by fleets, not individuals, by 2030)?

• What if the productivity gains arising out of reclaimed driving hours put more money into people’s pockets, so that they could buy different experiences over assets?

• What if people increased renting of assets (over buying these) because they were never sure of where they would be living a few years hence?

• What if the cost of commute became the ‘next telecom’ (virtually free, that is)?

• What if most cars were made from recycled steel, as a result of which ore companies went belly-up?

• What if the large steel sector debt could not be returned to banks?

• What if most people moved to electric cars by 2030?

• What if electric cars, with around 18 moving parts compared with 10,000 for the usual petrol-driven variety, accelerated the death of the automobile components industry?

• What if the demise of the auto component industry affected the global alloys steel sector (including ore and ferro alloys)?

• What if, in line with the Indian government’s indication, every new vehicle sold in India would be electric by 2030? 

• What if oil behemoths could not repay their loans if oil consumption declined (elimination unlikely)?

• What if electric vehicles came with unlimited warranty? Which means that after you had once bought a vehicle, you would not need to buy another, ever?

• What if oil-based economies (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Russia, Nigeria  etc) went into a crisis?

• What if some of the funding coming out of these countries (read what you will into this) disappeared and the world became a more peaceful place?

• What if cash-rich automotive lubricant companies suddenly discovered there was nothing to really lubricate?

• What if 3D printing evened out the wage arbitrage between developed and developing nations?

• What if robotisation (or artificial intelligence) cleaned out jobs (as it has in the banking sector, where business has grown disproportionately faster than recruitment)?

• What if a number of skills became obsolete (micro surgical, for instance) because a robot could do it better?

• What if renewable energy kickstarted a long-term coal decline?

• What if the need for rakes required to transport coal from pit-head to factories declined?

• What if large coal behemoths employing thousands filed for bankruptcy (already happening)?

• What if banks became a concept rather than a place; what if banks became more about systems than people?

• What if the world moved toward deflation arising out of an abundance of money and relatively limited spending?

• What if most things we pay for today became near-free (like in music, films, information, net search and news, etc)?

• What if the new retirement age became 50?

• What if people started losing their marbles because they had more money and time at their disposal than ever in the history of humankind?

• And, what if all this happened so fast and so extensively that we never quite had the opportunity to call the broker and say ‘Sell’?

The author is a stock market writer, tracking corporate earnings and investor psychology to gauge where markets are not headed