We have 40 years of oil left - then what for classic cars?

Absoulely right. Oil for generations. And in North America. Yes fracked wells run out faster. All you need is the keystone pipeline from Canada which Obama nixed. Elect a smarter person next time around.Our alternative is to send it over the rockies to the coast and ship to asia-we offered USA 1st dibs.

 

This is the same as the people who say that the world population will lead to starvation. They extrapolate more population keeping food production constant and ignoring advances in technology or changes in behavior. Running out of oil is sort of the same thing. If you stopped all exploration and technological advancement and said what we have is what we have then at some point we would run out. Otherwise much ado about nothing.

 

Not much of a mystery, really.


Petrol is designed to be unstable - it is this instability that makes it so flammable. It is a lot harder to set crude oil alight. Oil in nature is trapped in rock, at thousands of psi pressure, hundreds to thousands of metres below surface. Oil does not evaporate, not even at surface. Petrol does. Petrol tries to create a bond with oxygen to form CO2, H20 and a lot of heat. It does this more readily at high temperature, but at room temperature it does so too, albeit very, very slowly. If properly stored petrol lasts very long but if you have a direct opening to air, it will deteriorate (well, disappear, really).


Onno

 

You may be correct but we will see how Toyota handles your concern.

 

btw, it didnt form from dinosaurs either.

 

Tell that to this guy.
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I'm 47, but planning to live a long time!

Incidentally, I don't agree with your logic (and so far, history hasn't been on your side either).

In my opinion, your error is as follows: It is true that fewer and fewer young people, as a percentage of the population, will be interested in cars like these (although, an aside-- my 17 year old thinks old stuff like this is way cool-- he wants us to get a Model T). However, the population who has the means to acquire vintage cars is going to continue to grow for a long time, and so you are talking about a smaller percentage of a significantly growing population.

Meanwhile, the number of Duesenbergs is most likely going to remain stable. Hence, the price goes up, or at least remains constant.

 

Constant, relative to inflation?

I have my reasons to think as I do - continued legality of use, further advancement of mobility technology, disappearance of the craftsman trade, and general disinterest as the car-loving population dies. Also, it must be noted that when people suggest that prices are going to keep going up forever - that feeling can sometimes be a sign that the market is near a top.

 

This is an interesting thread but the topic / question is something we dont have to worry about. Internal combustion engines run on a mixture of oxygen and gasoline which is a various mixture of hydrocarbons exacted from crude oil. However, what is crude oil? Crude oil was formed from millions of years of biomass being compressed and heated under intense pressure within the earth's crust. What is biomass? It's a product of photosynthesis where the original source of energy are limitless streams of photons from the sun. So as long as the sun burns and we have photosynthesis (or life) on earth, we will have biomass. Biomass can be easily converted to gasoline substitutes (e.g. methanol) or other forms of biogas which can run in internal combustion engines. Thus this is a foolish topic to worry about as humanity will most not likely survive the end of the burning of our star. Perhaps we should ask the cockroaches who are more likely to be there till the end. Let's hope they evolve some intelligence so they can keep our beautiful Ferrari's putting along till the end of time.

 

The threat is not access to cheap oil and gas. Self driving cars are becoming a reality very quickly and with the aging population driving their adoption in the future, old cars are not going to be relevant. Transportation is becoming a shared appliance.

 

Self driving worry me (and fellow car guys I know in their 20s) so much more than oil access. I'm afraid it may not be legal to drive your own car on public roads by the time I'm at a point where I can own a Lusso or a Miura.

 

Self driving cars programmed by Google.. knowing your every destination, recording you, analyzing your emotions, health status, hearing your conversations and uploading them to the cloud.. now that's a scary vision of the future.

 

One reason that we have had only "X" years of oil reserves remaining is due to simple economics. It costs money to prove up reserves but it makes no sense to do so if the payoff is more than "X" years in the future because, with the way that the time value of money works, the net present value of that future payoff will be lower than the cost of investing today. You would be better off taking those investment dollars and spending them on something that will have a higher, and earlier, payoff.

You can be "pretty sure" that there is oil or gas in any given location but it doesn't make sense to "prove" that it is there until it is closer to the time when you want to extract it out of the ground. A matter of return on investment.

 

There is a limited amount of "cheap" oil left.
Then, we will dig deeper, which will simply cost more.
And as the price of oil goes up, it will get used less and less... leaving plenty to burn in classic Ferraris...
It's not an issue.

 

A lack of oil is not an issue.
I don't think self driving cars are an issue in themselves, though they are reflective of a move in society whereby responsibility is taken away from the individual.
The threat as ever is over zelous legislation by government, for example the proposed "Ultra Low Emission Zone" in London which may descriminate against classic cars.