No … Car fleet replacement will not take 20 Years Elon.

I hate to correct @elonmusk, but his assertion that it takes 20 years to replace the vehicle fleet is wrong.

Recently at the interview for his axel-springer award, Elon said that the car replacement would take 20 years. You can see the whole interview here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjLa834mv8Q

His 20 year replacement timeline is based in the normal rate of car manufacturing/car destruction and total global fleet size. Both of these will be disrupted.s

Whilst I don’t expect total car manufacturing rate to increase very much, with the introduction of cheap autonomous taxis networks, the number of cars being retired will increase very fast, especially with people living with urban settings where these networks will become ubiquitous.

In the more rural/commuter belt, 2 car households will become 1 autonomous car households.

This will drastically decrease the total size of the global car fleet as the rate of cars being removed will be at least twice the size of the cars being added to the fleet.

As time progresses, legislation increasing taxes on polluting cars (ICE) and restrictions on where those cars can travel to, will make them increasingly stranded/decreasing value assets on a household and further increase their removal rate

Finally, when 100% of cars being manufactured are electric — with every passing year — the economics of fuel stations become nonviable and these start to close and/or being repurposed. As fuel stations close they scarcity will mirror today’s EV customer pain-points of lack of charging infrastructure.

This again puts further pressure on ICE owners that will start accelerate the rate at wish ICE cars get retired from the fleet.
This becomes a self-fulfilling feedback loop what will both decrease the vehicle fleet and collapse the value of ICE cars.

This means that the total fleet refresh will not take 20 years as it occurs today. I expect that from the year when the majority of cars sold are EV the transition will take 10 years and we will end up will a smaller fleet (average of much less that 1 car per household) and where the large majority of miles driven per year will be done by autonomous taxis.

Tony Seba, has been long been describing this very scenario in this now popular presentations.

In his predictions, by 2030, over 95% of all milers driven will be done by TaaS (Transport as a Service) aka Autonomous Taxis

Tony is even more bullish on his assumptions than I am as he predicts individual car ownership will collapse to 70%

If Tony is right (and he has had a good track record so far), by 2030 the entire fleet will have been converted to Electric.

This has stark implications for current ICE manufacturers, especialy those that still have not cought up with these implications like Toyota, Honda, Ford and GM.
I except the majority of these companies will have merged/consolidated to survive or gone bankrupt.