In this article, I’ll make a five-year bet. I’m not making a claim about your local lot in 2026, but about where we’ll be in 2031. I think ordinary gasoline and diesel cars in the US will be worth less than the fuel, maintenance, and repairs it takes to keep them once cheap used EVs are sitting next to them. That is what I mean by worth less than zero. Of course, cars will still have scrap value for the materials in them and sentimental value for those who fondly remember the era of gas cars. So they will have positive value, but I’m saying they won’t have value as transportation if things play out as I describe below. This is similar to horses in the US. They still have value, but not for mainstream transportation for the average person. My recent article titled “For Lagging Automakers: Stop Pouring Money Into The Wrong Powertrains” explained how automakers should invest their money to remain viable, but I failed to explain why the market for new gas and hybrid cars would be so poor. The market in the US for gas cars and hybrids is very good now, why should it dramatically change in 5 years? That is what I am trying to explain in this article. This actually first was true when a person spending $250 a month on gas way back in 2014 saw that they could lease a Nissan Leaf for $199 a month and have a new car and fuel it for the price they spent on gas. I have been driving electric vehicles for 15 years, so the direction is not a surprise. I already ran the US math in my recent article on hybrids: 12,000 miles, $4 gasoline, 20 cents a kWh. I already highlighted used 2024 LEAFs at $15,000 to $20,000. What I have not written yet is the Norway and China used-ICE story, and why that same math shows up here on a lag. I’m convinced of the direction. So I am going to treat Norway and China as leading indicators, and I am going to say out loud what would have to be true to lose this five-year bet. Norway finished new-car ICE. That is the preview. Norway is the proof case for new sales. Battery-electric vehicles took 95.9% of new passenger-car sales in 2025. Plugins together took 97.5%. By July 2026, BEVs were 97.6% of new cars. CleanTechnica‘s Maximilian Holland put it plainly: Norway has effectively reached the end of the new-car transition. The fleet is a different animal, because cars last years. By mid-2026, BEVs were about 34.6% of Norway’s passenger fleet. More than 60% of the cars on the road still burn something. New-car share can be 98% electric while used lots are still trading combustion-engine cars. Anyone who tells you Norwegian used gasoline cars are already worth zero is mixing up this year’s showroom with last decade’s parking lot. The stations are changing the way businesses actually change. Circle K’s Berger site near Oslo cut pumps from 8 to 6 in July 2026 and added chargers. That is not “Norway ran out of gasoline.” Residual value dies that way: the support system gets thinner while the used EV alternative gets cheaper. Iceland is not Norway, and that is useful. Plugin share there has bounced with incentives, including a 2024 dip to about 43%. Policy can slow an S-curve. The US already yanked the federal EV tax credit. That is not a hypothetical. China is the used-market test Norway is a rich, small lab. China is the factory. In June I wrote that China’s NEV share had hit 63%. Jose Pontes has July 2026 passenger NEV retail at about 65%, with pure BEVs at 44%. That is the world’s largest car market flipping on new metal. The used market is the part that is news to me. From January to April 2026, used NEV trades in China hit 547,900, up 29% year over year, and resale values were up about 30%. Dealers were scrambling to buy used NEVs. Used gasoline cars went the other way. Dealers called them “unsellable.” One talked about nearly a 10% drop per month and eating a 30,000 RMB loss (about $4,400). Cars that had recently sold for 300,000 RMB were at 200,000 RMB. Here is the number that actually matters: three-year ICE residuals in China have been tracked down to about 46%. That is a real hit. It is also still a car with a five-figure price, not scrap. The signal I trust is the gap: NEVs around 63% of new sales but only 8.57% of the used market. That gap is the next wave. As three- and five-year-old EVs hit lots, leftover ICE vehicles get harder to move. The $50,000 gasoline car that becomes a $5,000 problem is the five-year destination I am betting on. It is not the 2026 Chinese lot, and it is not your neighbor’s Camry this weekend. The Regular Joe math A typical 25 mpg gasoline car at 12,000 miles burns 480 gallons. At $4 a gallon, that is $1,920 a year, or $160 a month, just for fuel. A thirstier truck at 18 mpg is about $2,667 a year, or $222 a month. For a 5-plus-year-old US ICE vehicle, I have used about $200 a month in fuel and $100 a month in repairs and maintenance. That maintenance number is an old-car number, not a new Camry. Consumer Reports is closer to an ICEV costing about twice a comparable BEV. An EV doing those same 12,000 miles uses about 3,000 kWh. At 20 cents a kWh, that is $600 a year, or $50 a month, if you can charge at home. Maintenance would be half as much as the gas car at $50 a month. A very efficient hybrid can get fuel near $800 a year. That closes most of the fuel gap with the EV. It does not close the gap with a regular ICE car. That is why I take hybrids seriously if fuel prices don’t rise significantly and laws don’t mandate change. You will see $200 a month in gasoline plus $100 in oil, filters, brakes, and service. University of Michigan work already finds used BEVs have the lowest US total cost of ownership. The five-year bet is that those prices keep falling as more off-lease EVs hit, and that a used gasoline car’s running costs stop making sense next to them. Three options for Regular Joe, looking at about 2031, not this weekend: Keep the paid-off gas car. You are still writing a fuel check, and shops and pumps get thinner. That costs you $300 a month. Sell it while someone else still wants it. In China that window is already slamming. In the US you still have time. That is why I am writing this now. Buy a cheap used EV for $10,000 and get a 5 year loan so you have a $200 a month payment plus your $100 a month for electricity and maintenance if you can plug in at home. Total of $300 a month, the same amount as the “free” gas car. If someone offered you a free gasoline car in a market where used EVs are inexpensive and cheap to run, option #2 is a logical choice. That is worth less than zero. The export valve delays the collapse. It does not cancel it. Unwanted gas cars have to go somewhere. China is the bigger dump valve: gasoline inventory that will not sell at home are headed to Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. You can postpone a residual-value collapse by exporting it. You cannot cancel it if those markets start doing the same TCO math, or if used EVs get cheap enough there too. The problem for the US is the other markets are doing the same math as I did above and will reach this same conclusion before we do in the US because they have access to inexpensive electric cars from China that we don’t have access to. What this means if you are still driving a $50,000 gasoline crossover or planning to sell new gas cars in 2031 If in five years a five-year-old gasoline car that sold for $50,000 is a $5,000 problem because nobody wants the fuel bill, what will GM, Ford, and Stellantis do with their new crossovers that are priced at $60,000? They won’t sell. That line is a scenario I am putting on the calendar. This is not a sudden event. It is what happens when EVs hit cost parity on total ownership and keep a much lower operating cost. Norway showed the new-car endpoint first. China is showing the used-car endpoint at scale. The US is on a lag. Devil’s advocate: what would have to be true for me to be wrong? I could be early. In the US I almost certainly am. I might not be five years early. I might be a decade early. The US is not Norway. NADA’s July 2026 figures have battery-electric share at 5.9% of new vehicles year to date, down 1.9 points after the federal tax credit expired. Hybrids are 15.4% and up 20.5% year to date. That is the hybrid waypoint looking like a destination, not a rest stop. At $800 a year versus $600 for a home-charged EV, Regular Joe will take the hybrid and never open PlugShare. This is a truck country. A used LEAF at $15,000 to $20,000 does not replace a work truck, a tow rig, or a rural driveway. If there is no cheap used electric truck, used ICE truck residuals stay “normal” even while sedans get harder to move. In America, that is a significant part of the market. Fleet math is brutal. S&P Global Mobility had the average US vehicle at 12.8 years in 2025, from about 289 million light vehicles. We sell about 16 million new vehicles a year. In five years, you nibble the fleet. You do not turn it over. “Worth less than zero” as a typical residual requires cheap used EVs to be plentiful. We do not have that stock yet. Home charging is doing a lot of work in my $50-a-month number. Roughly a third of US households are in multifamily housing. Public charging can turn that $50 into $150, and the hybrid wins on hassle. I cannot talk Regular Joe into a used EV if he parks on the street or in a large parking lot without a dedicated EV charging spot. China’s 46% three-year ICE residual is a warning, not a corpse. The export valve can stay open past my five-year mark. Africa and Latin America still motorize with cheap used ICE vehicles. Ethiopia’s ban is on new private imports, not the used Corolla pipeline. Used EV oversupply cuts both ways. If off-lease EVs glut the lots, EV residuals crash too. That helps the next buyer on TCO, and it wrecks the lease math that was supposed to put those EVs on the road. Electricity is not a constant. If residential rates keep climbing and gasoline stays in a $3/gallon to $4/gallon band, the operating-cost gap shrinks. Policy already reversed here. Five years is one election cycle and one oil-price cycle. It is not destiny. For the five-year US bet to land, several things have to go right at once: Used EV prices fall into Civic money for cars that actually replace a commute, not just a LEAF-shaped hole. Home charging, or cheap reliable public charging, shows up for people without a garage. Hybrids do not eat the “I don’t want to change” buyer. A used electric truck exists that Regular Joe will actually buy. Export markets get pickier, so leftover ICE vehicles cannot all be shipped away. Gasoline stays expensive enough that the fuel bill hurts. If two or three of those fail, 2031 looks like 2026 with a slower leak, not a floor dropping out. None of that reverses what already happened to new-car ICE in Norway or the direction of used ICE in China. It means I can be right about the physics and early on the calendar. Conclusion The residual value of ordinary gasoline and diesel cars collapses once used EVs are plentiful and cheaper to run. Norway and China are the leading indicators. The US is late. My bet is it will take about five years. If you own a paid-off gas car, run the monthly numbers this week: fuel and service versus a used EV you can actually plug in. If the fuel check already hurts, sell while someone still wants the car. If you are shopping, look at a used EV before you sign another gasoline note. If you make cars, every extra year of ICE tooling is a bet that the used market stays stupid. Late is not never. Five years is also not a promise. I am still making the bet. If you want to use my Tesla referral link for 3 months of Full Self Driving, here it is — https://ts.la/paul92237 — but if another owner helped you more, use theirs. Disclosure: I am a shareholder in Tesla [TSLA] and XPeng [XPEV]. But I offer no investment advice of any sort here.