<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>AtlasBarfed</author><text>I might be a bit crazy, but you just mentioned a slate of companies that absolutely have no future at their current scale. Sure this won&amp;#x27;t happen overnight...&lt;p&gt;But my theory with petroleum is that it has so many HUGE economies of scale built into its production that a demand collapse will send it into a rapid tailspin.&lt;p&gt;A small version of this happened in the Dakotas when the Saudis started dumping oil to get it under a price, and the North Dakota oil industry collapsed. That was due to intentional oversupply, not necessarily due to collapsed demand.&lt;p&gt;But so much of the oil market is now pretty expensive extraction: tar sands, shale oil, fracking, deep offshore. The easy stuff is gone. That to me means that the industry rests on a certain price, and if it falls under that, the industry can&amp;#x27;t sustain it.&lt;p&gt;I think the big thing in this reverse economies of scale, where costs rise as the industry shrinks (and absorbs writeoffs) is that finance, already somewhat intimidated by the growing pressure to divest from fossil fuels, will rapidly abandon it once it becomes extremely risky due to collapsing demand and massive migrations of transportation modes to electric.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s all vague decade-away prognostication, but you&amp;#x27;ll start hearing the violins playing for oil companies when some combination of this happens:&lt;p&gt;- charging infrastructure builds out (2 years to catch the current Tesla supercharger, probably another 5 years to get some semblance of every-50-miles availability)&lt;p&gt;- LFP chemistry hits a power density of somewhere around 200-250wh&amp;#x2F;kg (LFP is really cheap and has far less materials restrictions from cobalt) (probably in 1-2 years for mass production)&lt;p&gt;- various solid state technologies hit production (looks unlikely for 5 years)&lt;p&gt;- EV drivetrain cost (battery, motors, cooling, case, management systems, etc) drops to 2&amp;#x2F;3 of ICE (probably another 4 years)&lt;p&gt;- a carbon tax, a more substantial EV subsidy&lt;p&gt;The floor will rapidly fall.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not saying Tesla isn&amp;#x27;t insanely valued. But the grim reaper is coming for all those oil companies.</text><parent_chain><item><author>dado3212</author><text>For the record, their market cap is also greater than &amp;quot;Australia&amp;#x27;s Woodside Petroleum, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Imperial Oil, Royal Dutch Shell, Shell Energy North America, Canadian Natural Resources, ConocoPhillips and French group Total [combined]&amp;quot; [1], so they&amp;#x27;re also valued kind of crazy compared to energy companies...and that was in January 2021 before the most recent spike. Sure, part of that is faith in renewables. But in any fair comparison their stock price is still a little confusing.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tesmanian.com&amp;#x2F;blogs&amp;#x2F;tesmanian-blog&amp;#x2F;teslas-market-cap-exceeds-the-total-value-of-a-number-of-oil-and-gas-companies-that-s-p-may-downgrade&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tesmanian.com&amp;#x2F;blogs&amp;#x2F;tesmanian-blog&amp;#x2F;teslas-market...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>stmfreak</author><text>Tesla’s stock price is confusing if you compare them to a car company. But they are not just a car company. They are also a car manufacturing supply chain, having brought much of their component production in house. They are also an energy company, both generation and storage, but also distribution, like gas stations. Think Exxon, BP, Chevron, ARCO, etc.&lt;p&gt;They are probably a few other things, but this is the mystery of their valuation.</text></item><item><author>Waterluvian</author><text>I was very pessimistic about Tesla and confused by their stock price.&lt;p&gt;But I now believe that they indeed are doing it and that we’re finally at the EV revolution.&lt;p&gt;I’m not an early adopter type and the Teslas don’t excite me at all, but I’m really delighted that the market is evolving.  I’m delighted that I was wrong.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Hertz orders 100k Teslas</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-25/hertz-orders-100-000-teslas-tsla-stock-soars</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>grecy</author><text>With many developed countries passing laws to ban the sales of petrol and diesel passenger cars by 2030 or 2035, do all the companies you mention actually have a strong future of growth?&lt;p&gt;Do you want to buy stocks in companies that have a strong future of growth, or who have always made a lot of money doing one thing, and expect to keep making money doing that same old thing, even though it&amp;#x27;s clearly not going to last.&lt;p&gt;While they&amp;#x27;re not going to die overnight, I suspect they&amp;#x27;re not going to be worth all that much by 2050, and ~nothing by 2075.</text><parent_chain><item><author>dado3212</author><text>For the record, their market cap is also greater than &amp;quot;Australia&amp;#x27;s Woodside Petroleum, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Imperial Oil, Royal Dutch Shell, Shell Energy North America, Canadian Natural Resources, ConocoPhillips and French group Total [combined]&amp;quot; [1], so they&amp;#x27;re also valued kind of crazy compared to energy companies...and that was in January 2021 before the most recent spike. Sure, part of that is faith in renewables. But in any fair comparison their stock price is still a little confusing.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tesmanian.com&amp;#x2F;blogs&amp;#x2F;tesmanian-blog&amp;#x2F;teslas-market-cap-exceeds-the-total-value-of-a-number-of-oil-and-gas-companies-that-s-p-may-downgrade&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tesmanian.com&amp;#x2F;blogs&amp;#x2F;tesmanian-blog&amp;#x2F;teslas-market...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>stmfreak</author><text>Tesla’s stock price is confusing if you compare them to a car company. But they are not just a car company. They are also a car manufacturing supply chain, having brought much of their component production in house. They are also an energy company, both generation and storage, but also distribution, like gas stations. Think Exxon, BP, Chevron, ARCO, etc.&lt;p&gt;They are probably a few other things, but this is the mystery of their valuation.</text></item><item><author>Waterluvian</author><text>I was very pessimistic about Tesla and confused by their stock price.&lt;p&gt;But I now believe that they indeed are doing it and that we’re finally at the EV revolution.&lt;p&gt;I’m not an early adopter type and the Teslas don’t excite me at all, but I’m really delighted that the market is evolving.  I’m delighted that I was wrong.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Hertz orders 100k Teslas</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-25/hertz-orders-100-000-teslas-tsla-stock-soars</url></story>