Respectfully to the OP - Bovine Excrement!
My car is 20 years old. I have shirts that are 20 years old.
Anyone who honestly thinks that cars, roads, driving, owning, or work, are going anywhere in only 20 years is frankly delusional in the extreme.
I agree with many others that 20 years is wildly optimistic for this.
The Prius first came out in the US in 2000. It was the first mass-produced commercial hybrid vehicle. It’s now 11 years later, and total hybrid sales in the US are less than 10% of cars. And that’s just new cars. The average car lasts around nine years, so the percentage of hybrids on the road is probably about 5%. The adoption rate of new technology in cars is slow.
I’d be impressed if a major carmaker comes out with a self-driving car in the next ten years. If, 10 years after that, 10% of new cars are self-driving, that’d be a major accomplishment.
But lacks proper punctuation.
Now, back to the things in the spoiler box. Those seem like the type of things that we’ll look at in 20 years and say 'yeah, we were way off about that". I mean, (just looking at the 4th one) how many people can really work from home. Probably not enough to take any significant amount of vehicles off the road.
Well, yeah: it seems to assume that all work is purely a matter of pushing electrons around.
I heard the Freakonomics guy on Marketplace tonight express this as “80% of car passenger capacity goes unused” – e.g., I have a car that will hold five people, but I am the only one in it the vast majority of the time it is driven.
Sailboat: “Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour…”
Damn. The decay in our precious language goes backwards in time, too!