So should we be flogging off our oil burners while there's still some value in them and buying shares in battery companies? There's probably an electric vehicle start-up out there in a garden shed somewhere that'll turn out like Microsoft post 1980. If only I'd bought their shares back then <sighs heavily>

Actually, for a huge number of people, the technology that causes their vehicle to move under its own power could well be electricity- or pixie dust or a rubber band or a hamster on a treadmill. They neither know nor care what's under the bonnet. It's only that every now and again they have to pour some foul smelling liquid into a hole in the side of it (and mix with a load of foul smelling builders, truck drivers and other low lifes while doing it) that gives them a clue.

The car companies have engineered away the necessity to have any mechanical knowledge at all. If you know that the pedals go up and down and the steering wheel goes round and round, that's it, you're good to go. When you're dissociated from what you're doing to that extent it really doesn't matter what powers the car. We seriously looked at changing my wife's car to electric last year as even a current technology one would do for 90% of her mileage. What put us off primarily was economics. Compared to a similar petrol powered one they're just not value for money. That, I suspect, may well change as and when some of the technical shortcoming are also engineered away.

While most of the western (inc the "eastern western") economies depend on oil in its various forms (fuel, chemicals etc) as the driver of their prosperity and that oil is relatively cheap very little is going to change though. Electric vehicles - and particularly those controlled by semi autonomous software - may have a kind of "tomorrow, available today" shine about them but as anything other than local transport they have serious shortcomings. Any country that artificially pushes any of the alternatives at the expense of oil will eventually face the economic consequences of that decision because just about every alternative to oil (electricity, gas, biomass, animal labour etc) is either impractical, in short supply, technically inferior or lacks public support.

I'm not surprised about the BMW little /no development decision. A couple of years ago I was talking with an engineer working for Jaguar Land Rover and he told me then that mechanical engine development was increasingly taking a back seat to software development. They could (more or less) get any engine characteristics they wanted from existing knowledge and the only real RnD was being done on control systems to make the cars easier to use, pack in more marketable gadgets, dodge emissions controls etc (he didn't say the last one!)

TWB - have you tried buying minidiscs recently! Or camera film come to that. I went shopping in the Oxford branch of Waitrose (a UK supermarket chain) yesterday. Twenty years ago the building next door used to be a substantial professional photo processing lab. Now it's a cafe. All the pro labs within a thirty mile radius of here shut down within a year or two of each other round about 2003-4. You can still buy pro grade camera film but the prices are probably x5 what they were 20yrs ago and good luck trying to get anything like the 2hr processing service that used to exist. It's more like two weeks these days. It's just not viable to use it for anything other than a retro hobby now. How soon until hobby petrol is £25 / gallon and you have to drive to Glasgow to buy it?