Niall Ferguson, Columnist

China’s Auto Export Wave Echoes Japan's in the ’70s

Will electric vehicles change the world as much as railroads and internal-combustion engines did in centuries past?

June 4, 2023 at 4:00 AM UTC

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.” He is a columnist for The Free Press.

Elon Musk, getting conjoined.
Source: AFP/Getty Images

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Revolutions in transportation are rare and can define epochs. This has been true since men figured out how to ride horses (6,000 years ago) and to construct vehicles with wheels (just over 5,000 years ago).

How did the steam engine change the world? A lot. How did the internal combustion engine change the world? A lot. So how will battery-powered electric vehicles change the world? Probably a lot — but, if history is our guide, not necessarily in the ways we now anticipate.