Ending oil wars

Car companies mention reducing dependency on foreign oil a lot. Nissan's PR Manager Jeff Fisher did so just last week. Fisher, during a discussion with local journalists concerning the company's LEAF electric vehicle, spelled out the dichotomy that exists between car company expectations for zero- or low-emission vehicles by 2020 and what might happen in reality.

Currently, manufacturers expect electric vehicles to penetrate the market only so far as about 10 per cent of all vehicles sold. Some companies are more optimistic, suggesting as many as 20 per cent of all vehicles could be electric by then, but whatever the case, there will still be strong reliance on the internal combustion engine (and likely non-renewable fossil fuels to go with that).

In the current scenario people consider buying electric vehicles or hybrids for their environmental sensitivity or lower-cost running, but Nissan has sounded a warning that sharing diminishing fossil fuel resources in a rapidly expanding market can only lead to worsening foreign relations. That's a point not on the radar of the average Fred -- not in Australia, at least.

The plainest symptom of a squeeze on fossil fuel supplies would be governments perhaps taking drastic measures to wean people off the black gold. Fisher himself takes the view that market forces won't necessarily be the only factor influencing vehicle purchasing decisions by the end of the decade.

"2020 assumes... a market impacted by natural forces," said Fisher; "basically consumer forces. It doesn't assume any government [intervention]. So notwithstanding what might happen with US and western European governments, we might get to catastrophic situations in some of those countries within 10 years and governments might be forced into [taking stronger action]. They have done that in a minor sense now -- you look at London [and] the congestion charges...

"Those things will approach us stealthily over the next 20 or 30 years, and government will be a major driver in how that changes.

"Maybe zero-emission cars will arrive in totality much more quickly [by 2020], but it will be government responding to egregious situations that we can't halt."

With Australians apparently oblivious to the effect all this will have on the price we pay for fuel and the types of car we can afford to drive in the future, are we living in a fools' paradise? Fisher believes that while it's not a high-profile issue for the Australian community, it is more prevalent elsewhere and we will likely feel the pinch before the end of the decade ourselves. 

"In Australia it's a long way away, but if you go to different world centres -- go to the US, go to Western Europe -- national security is much, much higher in the consciousness of the everyday person," Fisher told the Carsales Network.

"I was in Heathrow last month and there were people walking around there with machine guns... again. Now I remember when they were doing that in the 80s, with the IRA.

"Average folk see that every week and see our police and soldiers walking around an airport and that brings that back home again. We're not going to see it here for a while."

At the moment, international terrorism may be about Israel and fighting against what's perceived as American hegemony -- that's one side of the argument -- but Kuwait and Iraq are both big petroleum producers and American troops have fought on the soil of both those countries during the last 20 years.

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