Driving with Dunne

Metis Engineering founder Joe Holdwarth got his start working on nuclear submarines. Today, he spends his days and nights finding ways to prevent thermal runaway events in electric cars. EV battery fires are rare. According to experts, fires occur just 5 times for every billion miles traveled. For internal combustion engine-powered vehicles, the number is 55. But when there is a thermal runaway ev...

What does living in a surveillance state look like? Well, now we know, thanks to a brilliant new book, Surveillance State, by Wall Street Journal veteran correspondents Josh Chin and Liza Lin. With more than 25 years on the ground in the People's Republic between them, Josh and Liza give us a firsthand look into how the Chinese government controls the behavior of 1.3 billion people around the cloc...

Henry Sanderson witnessed the explosion in demand for cars in China while living in Shanghai and Beijing from 2007 to 2014. He found the pace and magnitude of growth alarming. Then he returned to London where he began covering minerals and commodities for the Financial Times. Soon, he realized the world was stepping to a global super cycle around the minerals that feed into batteries. Demand for c...

Lars Carlstrom is a Swedish-born entrepreneur with a gift for identifying the next big opportunity. In 2019, he co-founded Britshvolt and quickly persuaded industrialists and politicians in the UK to endorse the idea of a national champion British battery company. In 2021, Carlstrom founded Milan-based Italvolt. Earlier this year, Carlstrom announced the formation of Statevolt in Imperial Valley,...

Meet Emily Hersch, founder and CEO of Luna Lithium, a mineral exploration company. Emily is leading a new wave of American entrepreneurs exploring and mining the essential ingredient for battery electric vehicles: Lithium. Emily is one of the most impressive, spontaneous and colorful guests we have ever had on the Driving With Dunne podcast. In our conversation, Emily delivers a direct and concise...

Are you struggling to find an affordable electric vehicle? You are not alone. The average price of a new electric vehicle sold in America in 2022 is a stunning $66,000. That’s more than a house in Detroit or Topeka. But if you look long and hard enough, you can still tease out some bargains. So says Matt DeLorenzo, author of a timely and practical new book called How to Buy An Affordable Electric...

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...

David Welch, the highly regarded veteran Bloomberg reporter, has written a timely and important book about how Mary Barra is leading a total makeover of General Motors. Barra's mission has been to transform GM from large and cumbersome and arrogant to a company that is lean, quick and profitable. The path to a flourishing GM, Barra believes, is total commitment to electric and autonomous vehicles,...

In early July, 2002 Michael Dunne traveled to Vietnam to take a closer look at VinFast, the remarkably young and ambitious manufacturer of electric vehicles. VinFast is a subsidiary of Vingroup, the largest private company in Vietnam. Chairman and Founder Pham Nhat Vuong and VinFast CEO Madame Thuy are determined to make VinFast a global success. An standard VinFast company mantra is "making the i...

Envisics is a UK-based technology company with deep expertise in holography. So, what are holograms? Those are the three dimensional images we see in sci-fi movies that originally appeared in the Star Wars series. Envisics projects informational holograms outside of the vehicle in the line of vision, about three feet in front of the driver's eyes. Think of it as a colorful head up display in three...

Octillion Power Systems supplies lithium-ion battery systems to car, truck and bus makers worldwide. The company has delivered more than 650,000 electric vehicle batteries to automaker,, including to the wildly successful made-in-China Wuling Mini EV. Octillion's new offices in Richmond, California serve as headquarters for company operations in North and South America. Mr Paul Beach, President of...

Gene Berdichevsky's life could come straight out of a James Bond movie. Born in the Ukraine, raised in Russia, he and his family immigrated to America when he turned nine years old. Along the way, he had lived for five years north of the arctic circle. Berdichevsky studied engineering at Stanford and convinced Tesla founders to make him employee No. 7. Today, Berdichevsky is the Co-Founder and CEO...

GM's has ambitious plans when it comes to electric vehicles. CEO Mary Barra says the company will be selling 1 million EVs a year by 2026, surpassing Tesla. That projected 2026 number will include everything from the just-launched $100,000 all-electric Hummers to $60,000 Cadillacs to sub-$30,000 offerings co-developed with Honda. How likely is the 114 year-old company to achieve its lofty goals? M...

San Francisco resident Ruth Wilcox decided to buy her first pure electric vehicle in 2020. She looked at a few different brands, including Tesla, but eventually decided to purchase an Audi e-tron. What made her elect the Audi over the others? And two years later, what have been the highs and lows of ownership? What about charging? And what are some of the quality issues Audi engineers need to addr...

In June, 2021, Ted Cannis was appointed CEO of Ford Pro, the vitally-important division focused on commercial vehicles like the Ford F-Series trucks and Transit vans. Ford sees enormous opportunity to grow this division in terms of revenues and profits in the next three years. In our conversation, Ted Cannis shares examples of how small to medium sized businesses can get a lot more efficient and p...

Roger Atkins is, without a doubt, one of the most knowledgeable and influential voices in the world of electric vehicles. He has a following of several hundred thousand people on LinkedIn. What people like about Roger is his deep knowledge, his self-deprecating sense of humor and his candor. In this episode of Driving With Dunne, I ask Roger about his 18 months of experience driving a Jaguar I-PAC...

In the early 2000s, a small group of friends in Palo-Alto, California started a movement to transform the way products are designed and developed. It came to be known as Design Thinking. Early pioneers included David M. Kelley, founder of IDEO and Diego Rodriguez, one of his star team leaders. The central idea of design thinking is to center all development not around the product or service but ar...

What does China want? What is Xi Jinping's endgame? Elizabeth Economy, a highly-respected scholar, keynote speaker and best-selling author, has clear ideas. Her new book, The World According to China, lays out China's ambitions to become the world's pre-eminent superpower, replacing the United States. China is already hard at work to realize Xi's dream. The country projects influence globally thro...

You can count on one hand the number of people in the world who know as much about batteries as Mujeeb Ijaz, In early 2020 Mujeeb took the monumental decision to found Our Next Energy (ONE), an advanced technology battery company with headquarters in Novi, Michigan. Mujeeb understood that range was a major limiting factor for customers considering a switch to electric vehicles. To reduce that purc...

Gas prices are going through the roof. Shell and Chevron now command more than $6 a gallon in California. People are asking themselves: Is it time to go electric? Up until now, consumers have been hesitant. Going electric has understandably felt like a big gamble because cars are such a big ticket item. What about range? Will charging be convenient? Is the battery safe from fires? Will I be able t...

In February 2022, Consumer Reports named the Mustang Mach-E the best electric car on the market, knocking Tesla from the number one position for the first time. The sporty SUV seems to be everything customers want in a Mustang: good-looking, modern - and very fast. People in America bought almost 30,000 of them in the first year, blowing past even the most optimistic projections by the team at For...

Gas prices are surging, prompting a record number of people to think about their first electric car. LA-based tech consultant Mark Concannon took that first leap into electrics just over one year ago. In this episode of Driving With Dunne, Mark shares what he likes about his Polestar 2 -- and where the vehicle comes up short. Mark recounts the full spectrum of his premium EV ownership, from the Go...

The team at Driving With Dunne has been receiving a flood of messages and emails from lots of people in the same position: They want to buy an electric car. But there are still so many unknowns. What about range? Are batteries safe? Will I really save money versus a gasoline car? What do maintenance and service costs look like? How does charging work? This week, we gathered with two veteran Tesla...

Leading global companies are now shifting investments in Asia to markets beyond China. At the top of their list are countries like Vietnam, for its manufacturing skills and Indonesia, for its massive home market of 260 million people. What is less well-known is that Southeast Asian markets are now also hubs of technology innovation. Singapore, the Philippines and Malaysia are bustling, powered by...

How is charging your car different from pulling up at a gas station? Is anybody taking care of the customer (and customer safety) at those dark out-of-the-way public charging stations? And why is Tesla several times better than everyone else when it comes to the charging experience? In this episode of Driving With Dunne, we get together with two highly respected experts in electric vehicles: Chels...