Driving with Dunne

You may not know it yet but there is a great battle underway for your eyes and for your ears inside the car. That battle is taking place between two powerful competitors. In this corner, we have current hardware and software giants like Apple and Google. Most of us are already addicted to their weapons - smartphones. In that corner, we have giant global automakers who are racing to build up their...

Drive the streets of San Diego and it will feel like the whole world is going electric. Here is a Tesla Model 3. There is a Hyundai Ioniq 5. Look at that Lucid Air. Or that cyber orange Mach E. Take your driving to the northern climes, like Detroit, Michiganor Green Bay, Wisconsin, and the picture looks totally different. There full-size pickup trucks and SUVs powered by gasoline engines rule the...

Ms. Lu Zhang moved from Inner Mongolia to the United States at the age of 20 to study material sciences at Stanford. Shortly after graduation, she founded her first company - one that made her independently wealthy. Today she leads Fusion Fund, a Palo-Alto based venture capital company that focuses on early stage investments. Ms Zhang is recognized as one of the top 25 leading female entrepreneurs...

Electric vehicles are expensive, out of reach for most customers. The average price of EVs sold in America last year was $65,000. The story in Europe was similar. China offers more affordable EVs. But they are driven by batteries that deliver dramatically lower range or power – or both. Who wants to buy an EV that is not quick off the start ? Or one that causes you range anxiety? Are we stuck in E...

Most modern cars come with adaptive front lighting, park assist, surround-view and rear view cameras, lane departure warning, automatic emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, and collision avoidance. But how do these magical powers work? These systems use image sensors that continuously sample the vehicle’s operating environment. A machine vision processor in the system controller analyzes th...

Powerhouse Ventures invests in early-stage software companies that save energy, save time – or both. Of the 33 companies in Powerhouse portfolio, several operate in the battery and electric charging arena. A few years ago, Ms Thompson made a monumental shift from the oil and gas industry in Texas to the clean energy focus that defines her work at Powerhouse. In our conversation, she introduces us...

Electric vehicles remain expensive, out of reach for most customers. The average price of EVs sold in America last year was $65,000. The story in Europe was similar. China offers more affordable EVs, but they are driven by batteries that deliver dramatically lower range or power – or both. Who wants to buy an EV that is not quick off the start ? Or one that causes you range anxiety -- and sometime...

In late 2022 and early 2023, customers from Ford, Rivian and Bolt separately reported an unusual and slightly terrifying experience while fast charging their vehicles. In the middle of their charge sessions, customers recalled hearing a large boom, then a pop. Seconds later, their charging stopped and their battery ceased to work. Tow trucks were summoned to take their vehicles to the nearest serv...

Graphite is a core component of lithium-ion batteries, accounting for up to 30% of the value of a battery cell. Today, Chinese companies utterly dominate refining, producing 93% of all processed graphite globally. America is now hell-bent building its own batteries and battery supply chains. Since 2021, American car makers and battery manufacturers have announced more than $60 billion in new batte...

Today’s charging experience in North America is, to be blunt, not good. New EV owners meet disappointment in the very first weeks of ownership. Some chargers are broken. Others are slow. Still others fail at software handshakes. When EV owners charge at a third party station like Electrify America or EVgo there are are too many “cooks” and too much complexity. I one owns the customer experience. A...

Imagine a future in which car buyers choose a make and model based not on acceleration, handling and braking but on their digital cockpit experience. How well does the navigation work? How rich are the media options? How quick and intuitive is the interface. Guess what? That future is already here. People, especially younger people, want to enjoy their digital life inside the vehicles while they a...

Meet Joe Lowry, a man who in the battery minerals world is known as Mr Lithium. Lowry got his start in lithium at just about the same time that lithium ion batteries first started powering made-in-Japan consumer electronics like the Walkman. He has direct first hand experience working shoulder to shoulder iwt leading lithium players in Japan and in China. And he is on a first name basis with the f...

There are a lot of people in America and Europe willing to tell you that they "know China." In reality, very few Westerners really understand China. Fewer still can communicate what they know in clear and compelling terms. Then there is John Pomfret, a China veteran with deep hands-on experience. He is also an outstanding writer. Pomfret's landmark book, The Beautiful Country and The Middle Kingdo...

Meet VinFast, Vietnam's young, bold and relentless EV champion. In late December, 2022, Madame Thuy Le, VinFast CEO, supervised operations at the port in Haiphong as the first 999 VinFast VF 8s were loaded aboard a ship to San Francisco. This month, American customers started taking delivery of the all-electric crossovers. The speed with which 5-year old VinFast started exporting cars to America i...

Have you been searching for an expert go-to source for knowledge on batteries? Look no further, Battery Brunch is here. In 2019, MIT graduates and Silicon valley battery scientists Yen Yeh (Voltaiq), Linda Jing (Tesla) hosted the first ever Battery Brunch, a small gathering of a dozen battery minds in the Bay Area. Today, Battery Brunch has blossomed into a hugely valuable meeting point for thousa...

In November, 2022 Lordstown Motors began delivering Endurance full-size electric trucks to fleet customers in America. Lordstown, named after the city in northeast, Ohio, represents an important new chapter in America's automotive manufacturing history. Lordstown is the designer and engineer of the electric vehicle. Samsung supplies the battery. And Foxconn, the powerhouse Taiwanese maker of our i...

There is a once-in-a-hundred-years revolution underway in Europe. For many decades, cities in Europe have been built to serve the car. Now the mayors of cities like Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Brussels are taking steps to change roads into living spaces for people, bicycles, trees, flowers and kids playgrounds. People are taking to the streets to take back the streets. Cars are still welcome...

Imagine you're in the market for a full size pickup truck. And you like the F-150, America's best-selling vehicle for the past 40 years. But, wait, there's a new twist in the decision-making process. Should you get a gasoline-powered F-150 or the electric F-150 Lightning? To get answers, we turn to our guest today, Darren Palmer. Darren is the Vice President of Electric Vehicles in Ford's Model e...

When she was an engineering student at MIT, Kristin Slanina led her team to victory in a solar car race through five states in America's northeast. That early achievement inspired Kristin, decades later, to launch Charge Across America, a contest featuring teams driving from New York to Los Angeles in five different electric cars. The main purpose of the competition was to assess the readiness of...

In Part I of this conversation, Reilly Brennan described how the days of late October, 2022 will go down in history as some of the most important in the history of autonomous vehicles. In the space of just a few days, one company (Argo AI) went out of business, Tesla was taken to court for its Autopilot system and Reilly Brennan experienced a transcendent "before and after" moment when taking the...

Scour the planet and you are unlikely to find anyone who knows the business of autonomous vehicles (AVs & ADAS) better than Reilly Brennan, Co-Founder, Trucks Venture Capital. Over the past ten years, Brennan has taken rides in more than 100 autonomous vehicles. He and his partners at Trucks Venture Capital have also invested in dozens of startups in the AV ecosystem, including leading innovators...

Almost half of all humans now live in cities. By 2300 that number will climb to 75%. With so much population density, how will people get around? Horace Dediu and Roman Meliska have some powerful ideas. The future of transportation in cities is smaller, lighter, quicker and smarter. There is a shift underway to new modes of transportation that they call Micromobility. It is not the end of the car....

StoreDot is an Israeli-based technology startup with deep expertise in charging batteries. The company is focused on extreme fast charging for electric cars. How extreme? StoreDot aims to deliver 100 miles of charge to your car battery in only five minutes. Among his financial backers: Samsung, Daimler, British Petroleum and VinFast. Doron and his team will demonstrate the "100 in 5" charge breakt...

Reuters has just published a blockbuster forecast: Global automakers plan to invest $1.2 trillion in electric vehicles, batteries and supply chains between now and 2030. That is a massive, unprecedented number in the 130-year history of the auto industry. Just how big is 1.2 trillion? It is the equivalent to the GDP of Spain. It is also the same as Apple's market cap. Which companies are investing...

Li-Cycle is a lithium-ion battery recycling company co-founded in 2016 by Tim Johnston and Ajay Kochhar, engineers with deep experience in minerals and mining. By 2025, there will be 900,000 tons of end of life batteries that need processing in North America and Europe. Li-Cycle is ramping up capacity to meet that future demand with operations in Arizona, Alabama, New York and Ohio. There are also...