Posts Tagged by Warren Buffett
EVWorld’s Bill Moore Speaks with BYD Chairman Wang Chuanfu
| May 2, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Electric Vehicles |
I’m always a bit cheesed off when my Monday morning calls to my business partners reveal that they had more exciting weekends than I did. While I was getting a bit of exercise and catching up on my writing, my partner at EVWorld, Bill Moore, was hanging out with one of the world’s most influential people: Wang Chuanfu, BYD’s founder and chairman, whom he met and interviewed at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders’ meeting in Omaha.
I would have ridden my bicycle there to meet Chuanfu. In 1995, he built a company from scratch that now employs more than 200,000 people, and aspires to be the world leader in electric cars.
And I’m not betting against him, even though the company takes a very interesting and controversial approach to business: vertical integration, taken to the max. They do the mining, build the battery cells, assemble the packs, and then integrate the packs into the cars. On top of that, they’re all over the clean energy required to charge the batteries in the most eco-sensitive manner possible, investing heavily in renewables — especially solar.
Does this extreme level of verticality seem improbable in a world of global commerce where micro-specialization is the order of the day? So it would appear to me. But I’m not one of the world’s wealthiest people — nor did I spend the weekend with one. Grrr.
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Vehicle Electrification – by Guest Blogger Anil
| April 3, 2010 | Posted by Anil under Electric Vehicles |
Transportation is a major cause of carbon emissions, so much so that it accounts to the north of 20 percent. The US, being at the forefront of industrial development, has its fair share in overall emissions. But the federal government in the states is pushing vehicle electrification in its bid to reduce dependence on foreign oil. President Obama has set a target of one million electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles on the road in the United States by 2015.
Steven Chu, Secretary of the US Department of Energy (DOE) claims, “Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles could revolutionize personal transportation and cut our dependence on foreign oil, not to mention give us cleaner air and less carbon pollution.” Read More
