It's another AA meeting.

Kevin joins the group. Before long he's fidgeting with his left hand, bringing it up, down and across, while his right foot matches the movement.

Noticing the attention of others, he stops, looks up and announces: "Hi, my name is Kevin, and I drive a petrol-powered car."

"Hi, Kevin," the others respond in unison. "Welcome to Automobile-drivers Anonymous."

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For some it's a dystopian vision; for others quite the opposite: the petrol-powered combustion engine shorn of its social licence, its adherents forced to find solace with alcoholics, smokers and climate-change deniers.

American academic and provocateur Tony Seba believes it's just around the corner. The Stanford University economist has predicted the fossil-fuelled engine will be obsolete by 2025.

Others have rubbished the claim. New Zealand motoring correspondent Richard Bosselman calls it outdated, disproved.

123RF The social licence supporting our fossil-fuelled cars is running low as more environmentally friendly options hit the road.

The figures appear to back that up. Electric vehicles make up a fraction of the global vehicle fleet.

But sales are surging on the back of societal change and social agitation.

And a New Zealand academic believes that Seba might have the expiry date wrong but the new decade could well end with petrol-heads in purgatory, maybe even a Prius.

The New Zealand Government has sent a strong signal by ending the offshore exploration of oil and gas, and late in 2019 tens of thousands of people, inspired by young activist Greta Thunberg, marched on our Parliament and in other centres to urge action on climate change.

Businesses and other organisations are feeling the heat.

Student-led action last year forced the University of Auckland to join Victoria and Otago in stopping investment in fossil fuels, following 1000 other institutions around the world.

Car makers too are sensing the beginning of the end, and are acting.

Jaguar has surveyed Australian drivers and predicts two-thirds of them will own an EV or hybrid within the decade. That was before the devastating bushfires blamed on climate change, and public agitation about apparent government inaction.

In the European Union, there were 262 million cars in 2017. Just 2m of them were electric vehicles or hybrids.

But that was seven times the number in 2013. And in the first three financial quarters of 2019, driven in part by significant subsidies not yet available in this country, they made up close to 400,000 vehicle sales.

In the Netherlands and Norway, Tesla's Model 3 is the highest selling car.

European car manufacturers Volvo and Volkswagen are among many planning to remove petrol-powered drive trains from the production lines.

Meanwhile, whole countries, including India and Norway, and some prominent cities are working out ways to ban internal combustion engines entirely.

And in China, Tesla has just opened a huge factory to feed the world's largest EV market.

The company, headed by messianic, mercurial billionaire Elon Musk, is yet to record an annual profit but the punters believe he is on to a good thing: Tesla is now the most valuable car company in the US, its shares worth more than Ford and GM combined.

Even Bill Ford, the executive chairman of the company and industry started by great-grandfather Henry, has had to admit that within the next 10 years Ford will be selling mobility, not necessarily cars.

Bodo Lang, a senior lecturer in the University of Auckland's Department of Marketing, believes petrol-powered cars may survive beyond the decade in New Zealand, but their social licence to operate will be running on empty.

Today's consumers have a lot more power to inspire change in businesses, says academic Bodo Lang.

"You can see how our cultural values are changing," he says. "We are going away from: 'Wow, you've got a big exhaust, mate, that's amazing', to 'Wow, you've got no exhaust – tell me, how many newton metres of torque does this thing have?'

"If you have a fancy car that is quite powerful, a V6 or V8 with twin exhaust pipes . . . that very symbol of power, status, is completely inappropriate in a market that we are moving into."

Like the rest of the world, electric and hybrid vehicles are a fraction of New Zealand's nearly 4-million-strong national fleet.

There were just under 12,000 electric vehicles in 2018, according to Ministry of Transport figures. But that was a leap of 5000 per cent on the 235 cars five years earlier.

The 2169 new and used electric vehicles registered between July and September last year made up just 3.3 per cent of the 64,730 passenger cars registered in the same period.

But the Government is tipping a dramatic upsurge in the next couple of years and decades, with 64,000 EVs by the end of next year and 40 per cent of the fleet by 2040.

It is looking to introduce an incentive scheme next year that will make electric, hybrid and the most fuel efficient cars cheaper while raising the price of gas guzzlers.

Lang sees such initiatives and the diminishing social licence playing a big role in the demise of fossil-fuelled transportation.

Businesses are no longer able to ignore the concerns of their customers.

"Consumers used to be viewed as quite a passive part of the business environment," he says. "They didn't really have a platform, but these days it's entirely different . . . they have the ability to really influence what businesses do . . . to drive that change."

Toyota, one of the country's most trusted brands and long its automotive market leader, has been unable to ignore the momentum.

Its New Zealand chief executive, Alistair Davis, said as much in support of the Zero Carbon Bill introduced last year. "Toyota takes its responsibilities to customers and the environment very seriously," he said at the time.

As part of that, every Toyota or Lexus model would be "either a dedicated electrified model or with an electrified hybrid option by 2025".

Even supercar marque Ferrari has been unable to ignore the throaty rumble of agitation.

"They have said the new F8 Tributo will be the last car with what has been their core [fossil-fuelled] engine," says Bosselman. "It's just part and parcel of the world we live in."

That's music to the ears of Greenpeace climate and energy campaigner Amanda Larsson.

GREENPEACE Greenpeace campaigner Amanda Larsson says putting a deadline on the import of petrol and diesel vehicles would promote the use of more electric cars.

She sees a strong link between global agitation against oil and gas and the rapidly declining social licence of the petrol-powered car.

"The public are really demanding alternatives," she says. "In Europe there are very strong campaigns around air pollution, the connection of diesel with health issues, respiratory issues, also blood pressure and heart disease."

That has inspired tough new rules on emissions, to be phased in this year, meaning new cars are limited to an average 95gm of CO₂ per kilometre, against 120gm previously.

"That changes the way they have to design and build cars," says Bosselman. "It pushes them – European brands that come to New Zealand – into building more hybrids."

Larsson sees parallels with the activism and consumer agitation that helped change the fashion industry.

"There has been a lot of social justice activism against child labour, poor working conditions, against using pesticides," she says.

"Massive garment companies like H&M now have lots of organic cotton, use less water . . . [more garments] now say organic and sustainably sourced cotton on them compared with 10 years ago."

Academic Lang sees similar consumer concerns driving the demise of single-use plastic bags, caged eggs, and in growing issues with tourism, farming, even eating meat.

"Fifteen years ago, consumers didn't have a platform where they could write a blog with 10 million followers; that just didn't happen," he says. "But now, one single person can impact the marketplace dramatically, and that's often done through influencers."

Businesses will also act if they see a good commercial opportunity.

"Some consumers had been umming and ahhing about plastic bags for a while," says Lang, "but my sense is that retailers were really pushing that; they could see there was a commercial opportunity to do branding on the bags, they are worth a lot more, these bags, and we don't want to be giving away all these plastic bags."

And businesses often preferred to make the change themselves, rather than have it forced upon them.

"Business and industries want to, at all costs, prevent the Government from introducing legislation or, even worse, regulation."

Bosselman acknowledges the impact of agitated consumers and environmental groups, but he believes car makers have been just as active in their planning.

DAVID UNWIN/STUFF Motoring journalist Richard Bosselman says the future is electric, and it could come even sooner if the Government raises subsidies for EVs and hybrids.

"They spend a lot of time looking at very long-term forecasts. They started down this road a lot earlier than people would recognise."

And it's likely to be a long and winding road, rather than a short cut, he says. "The average car life in New Zealand is 14 years, so anything you buy [now] brand new with a petrol engine is still going to be in circulation in 2034.

"Beyond that, there will be greater reliance on EVs and fuel-cell models and hydrogen.

"The auto industry believes we won't totally leave behind the fossil-fuelled engines till about 2050."

That's still just 30 years away.

But all three agree it could come a lot sooner if the Government matched the efforts and activism of consumers, environmental groups and businesses.

"The Government doesn't appear to want to subsidise electric vehicles," says Bosselman, "but the only way you're going to get things going is to bring in some sort of incentive to buy EVs, especially new ones.

"Then business would look a lot closer at it than they are."

Both Bosselman and Larsson would like to see changes in the country's vehicle importation market – newer cars, better quality and variety beyond the ubiquitous Leaf and all-too rare and expensive Tesla.

She is keen on a 2030 deadline for stopping diesel and petrol cars.

Lang would like to see "negative pressure" on the price of fuel. "If the Government makes a decision that there's now sufficient supply of second-hand and new EV and hybrid vehicles coming in, let's do something with the petrol tax. That would really drive change."

That's likely to make Kevin and many others squirm, their hands fixed even more firmly on the steering wheel of their beloved gas guzzlers.

They can stay there for now but it's clear their days are numbered.