The term “disruptive”, when applied to technology, refers to something which replaces the incumbent technology for a particular application.  Replacing the internal combustion engine in a car with an electric motor will, it is hoped, eventually prove a disruptive technology.  At the moment, however, electric motors are not in any position to disrupt combustion engines in all cars.

In the most influential analysis of technology disruption, Clayton Christenson used many examples to show how difficult it is for a new technology to dislodge the current one. The latter has the benefit of widespead understanding, a support infrastructure, and an ongoing research and development programme that constantly refines it, year on year.  In the car industry, the efficiency of modern car engines compared with those of just a few decades ago shows this effect – despite the fact that there is hardly anything in a modern car that hasn’t been well known and understood for a generation.

Given this very common scenario, it is surprising that any disruptive technology ever makes it to market, unless it has some all encompassing technical and commercial advantage. When we study actual examples we often find, as Christenson did, that early disruptive technologies did not initially have either a technical or a cost advantage in the current dominant application.

A good example for Christenson is hydaulic mechanical digger – which the British call a “JCB” in honour of the first mass market supplier of these machines in the UK.  When these first appeared, the predominant mechanical digger used a crane arm, drag chains and a buckets to excavate prodigious quantities of material at one draw.  And you can still find machines like that at work in open-cast coal mines today, even though they have all but vanished elsewhere.  Early hydraulic diggers didn’t have the capacity to take over the most common application.  Instead, they were used for new, much smaller applications, where their flexibility and their ability to work in confined spaces enabled them to tackle jobs that a crane-type digger couldn’t.

Another more recent example of disruption is the personal computer, which has all but replaced the mainframe to the extent that large central computing facilities are now based on arrays of cut-down personal computers.  But the PC didn’t do mainframe computer work initially.  It performed useful and recreational functions for individuals, then office and clerical functions.  Cut-down lower powered mini-computers were developed to deliver mainframe applications at much lower cost to smaller companies or distributed large ones. The personal computer, now backed by the rapid evolution a huge market and many suppliers provides, was soon able to disrupt the mini-computer and then go on to replace (or perhaps one should say, redefine) the mainframe as well.

So how’s the electric car doing as a disruptive technology for personal transport?  A direct assault on the sub-compact car market – i.e. by trying to do what a car does today – will be difficult for the electric car given the weight of its batteries and how long they take to charge. For as long as batteries are a hundred times heavier than a petrol tank for the same energy storage, electric cars as currently constructed aren’t ever going to completely replace conventional ones.  However, there are some things they can already do better than a car, and if they can establish themselves sufficiently doing those things, history suggests that they will attract investment away from the incumbent technology to the point where they may eventually displace it.  Currently, however, electric cars will struggle if they attempt to persuade the mainstream car market that they represent a superior product.

Consider, therefore, a potential scenario which could explain, after the fact, how and why electric cars eventually displaced internal combustion engined cars for most consumers.

1.  The cost of fuel increases by ten-fold while the cost of electricity doubles.

2.  Electric batteries improve along the current trajectory to the point where, while they may not hold as much energy as a petrol tank in terms of weight, they can do so in terms of cost.

3.  As driving a high speed long range car becomes increasingly more costly in terms of both running cost and insurance, young people are priced out of the car-owning market.  They turn to cheap, lightweight electric cars which can fulfill the transport needs of the urban young.  These cars do not go very far or very fast, but they don’t need to.  Governments encourage them by lowering the driving age for lightweight electric cars to 16 while raising the driving age for conventional cars to 21.

4.  Inductive charging at fuel stations, lay-bys, and car parks becomes widespread to the point where pretty well everywhere is within 10 miles of a charge point.  The electricity is charged to your electricity bill, and a lightweight electric vehicle can be significantly recharged in an hour.

5.  Next generation inductive charging allows lightweight electric cars to pick up their charge from the road whie on the move.  As a result, battery sizes can reduce to cater for the longest “off-grid” trip the buyer expects to make.  These electric cars are not only more energy efficient than petrol cars, they are now significantly faster as well.

6. On the back of the lightweight wired grid infrastructure, larger electric cars and commercial vehicles with more extensive off-grid capacity start to compete with internal combustion engined vehicles in all applications.  They are already much cheaper to run, to build and to service.

6.  Combustion engined vehicles become specialist, and/or confined to off-road application in developed economies.  Their fuel is now bio-fuel derived from sustainable sources without undue impact on food supply in the Third World, because it only needs to provide a fraction of today’s vehicle power.  Developing world economies which do not (yet) have an electricity grid may instead develop a distributed power infrastructure based on renewable energy to take advantage of the cheaper electric vehicles.

This is, of course, a prediction filled with unlikely fancy, and is almost certainly not the way the World will go.  But had you predicted the the personal computer and the Internet in the mid 1960’s, you’d have sounded just as silly as this does!