Presentation of CleanTech–Electric Transportation in Particular

A few readers have commented that my colleague Fritz Maffry has some excellent insights into the future of technology, including, of course, cleantech.  Here’s his latest installment that includes a solid discussion of the electric vehicle curve:

We have been talking about artificial intelligence and intelligent assistants for some time. Now everyone is talking about them, featured articles in The Economist, Wired Magazine, Fortune. The U.S. president is talking about it as a moonshot; Fortune is talking about it as key to future economy; Google is talking about it as with machine learning being the most important opportunity and focus of the company going forward.

This generation of autonomous automotive is not the all purpose general robot though; it is special purpose application oriented, and may have 100 different kinds of intelligent systems working in a network to make it all happen.

Amazon and Google, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, they all get this. Competition is fierce.  This is a competitive battle for the high ground; it is not a gentlemen’s research project.

Sales Volume on Electric Vehicles

Both the U.S. and the European market eclipsed 500K units in their fleets, electrics or plug ins. Both will end probably near 600K in number for the year. Not too far off original goal, but numbers for both will probably be 200K in addition next year or more.

Little Norway keeps showing how you can do things if you actually mean it and execute. They recently had time periods where virtually half the new cars sold were electrics. If you align and mean it you can get things done.

Google is focusing more on multimode transit and autonomous, and getting ready for brutal fights with non-conventional models up against status quo. Artificial intelligence, virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, next generation media, smart assistants, all top of plate.

The tech industry in general is making phenomenal and largely unheralded reorganization to solve issues around transport like they have never been solved. They are getting it done; when you see their applied research budgets, cash positions, research portfolios of priority, you can see right what they are aiming at.

The deals in autonomous and related around electric vehicles are proliferating, probably about 20 deals over 300 million in last three months, and huge alliances also. Kind of like the ramp-up for World War III in the commercial space.

Speaking of conflicts, the Middle East is the gift that keeps on giving. We have spent $8 trillion dollars.  See the latest Frontline episodes if you want to understand what a mess and how impossible the situation is. Russia is a bad actor, but our strategy has resulted in a mess; sometimes all that region offers is a mess. Oil is still behind much of the dynamics.  We have not good but great options. Same environment, same quality of life. If anything our media is shortchanging the horrible mess and poor options of more of the same in the Middle East.

Tesla is getting ready to move to the next generation Panasonic cell with greater price/performance and better energy storage economics. Also they are taking reservations for energy storage systems. Elon Musk is still better by far than anything going in terms of moving the industry forward. GM deserves huge kudos for Bolt, as I have said when it is commercially being sold; GM should get a Nobel Prize, more likely to help move the world forward positively than all the jawboning. Nissan is now coming out with huge plans with Mitsubishi; they are smart and intend to compete, though they are temporarily down in a product cycle. Those are the three lead horses right now, in volume, execution, and near-term expectations.

GM will route most of their Bolts to California early on, and also to new business model partners Lyft/Cruise Automation. The product’s becoming commercial doesn’t mean it is generally available; usually there is some version of a controlled release. Places that acted like they meant it over last five years will get allocations, those that dawdled will not be prioritized; that is how it goes.

The national labs are racing forward on innovations. We did a lot of right things there, on the uptake with the public on the local basis, plans have been mediocre; usually the local carve-up takes things into mediocrity more about pork than first purpose of brilliant electric vehicle success. That will not be as repeated with autonomous vehicles as the government has learned not to go down that rabbit hole. Rhetorically question: how does your region compare with Norway?

There is every reason to be extraordinarily positive on the coming electric ecosystem; it is almost certainly inevitable at this stage, as is the inevitability of tech taking on a much more dominant and decisive role in the U.S. and global economies.   One can look at the cost/performance curve of a dozen key technologies making possible the electric ecosystem; the iterative improvements are so compelling; other conclusions are simply uninformed if they don’t think tech will start displacing at scale a huge amount of the traditional economy.

By the way, there are very important “mistakes of strategy” that have been made.  In person I can describe those at length with detailed explanation illustrated with tangible examples.

Complacency and amateurs are not the way to get things done.  For a while things were stuck; now they are stuck in extraordinarily exciting and dramatically unfolding.  Get your popcorn and enjoy the show.