🚀 Su$tainable Mobility: Tesla’s Supercharging Flywheel Entered Hyperdrive
Vol 57
This bi-weekly newsletter aims to separate the signal from the noise for making money in sustainable: Electrification, mode shift, active and public transit, and mobility aggregation, across both people and goods movement.
Next week, I’ll be speaking at the Sensors Converge conference in Santa Clara on a panel entitled Smart City Safety: Use Cases for LiDAR in Intelligent Transportation Systems. Drop me a line if you’ll be there as well.
Also, I’ve become a fellow in the 3rd cohort of the Material Change Institute. The Material Change Fellowship is a 12-month integrated, comprehensive executive program for investors.
Also I was a guest this week on the CleanTechies podcast. Check it out!
This week’s Dive Dive revisits Vol 38’s Deep Dive (“Is Tesla’s Supercharging Flywheel Entering Hyperdrive?”). This time around, the Deep Dive is entitled Tesla’s Supercharging Flywheel Entered Hyperdrive.
Know a cool startup or have a story idea? Submit startups & ideas here.
🌱STARTUP WATCH: Sustainable mobility startups (pre-seed or seed) to keep an eye on
About Energy (United Kingdom): Software intelligence across battery lifecycle
Axle Energy (United Kingdom): Home energy management software, including smart EV charging
Croft (Georgia, USA): Modular, portable hydrogen fuel system for trucks and off-road equipment
Deja Blue (France/New York, USA): Vehicle-to-grid infrastructure-layer software from an ex-Uber and Lyft team
Easy Matutu (Uganda): Micro-transit platform connecting informal transit operators with customers
Guided Energy (France): Software for EV fleet managers
Ohm Charging (California, USA): Turnkey EV installation process for commercial EV charging
Vellex Computing (California, USA): Computing chip for accelerating grid-computing applications, including EV charging challenges
💰FUNDING: Capital raises from startups previously featured in Startup Watch
Aviant (Vol 4) raised an additional 1M EUR from Bring Ventures, Innovation Norway, and Luminar Ventures
Revoh (Vol 27) raised a $425K seed round from Nexzu Technologies and Whiteboard Capital
Vayve (Vol 46) raised a $400K pre-seed round (investors undisclosed)
Reminder: The startup data set is open, for free. If you’re a subscriber interested in accessing the Airtable with all the raw data on ~400 companies, please let me know.
📰QUICK HITS: Notable news from the last two weeks
👩🏽⚖️Government, Policies & Cities
🚒 In Paris, firefighters are getting to their destinations faster due to the proliferation of bike lanes (article in French). Sidebar: in the US, street width is sometimes dictated by large emergency vehicles, despite the availability of narrower alternatives.
🧷 San Francisco’s transit chief blasted autonomous vehicle companies Waymo and Cruise for lax safety. Look for tension between cities and the state regulators as autonomous vehicles come to more cities.
🛟 California lawmakers have agreed on a bailout to prevent SF Bay Area transit agencies from going off a “fiscal cliff.” There’s no east way to stop the COVID-induced transit death spiral in the Bay Area without massive government support.
🇵🇱 Poland continues to play spoiler in Europe’s plan to ban internal combustion engine car sales by 2035. Not easy advocating against the inevitable.
🇫🇮 In Finland, a multi-millionaire was given a €121,000 ticket for speeding. Finland is one of the few countries to index speeding tickets to income.
🇪🇺 The European Parliament passed groundbreaking laws on making batteries cleaner. The carbon reporting requirement is worth keeping an eye on.
🚁 The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) unveiled pilot training guidelines for eVTOLs (air taxis). The actual problem to be solved by air taxis merits clarification.
👨🎓 A summer intern is finding it cheaper to fly to work rather than renting locally. Speaking of inducing demand for aviation…
🦓 The US EPA is adjusting its methodology on plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) to account for higher gasoline usage than initially expected. I’m still a fan given their flexibility.
🗳️ If you’re in the US, what does your car say about your political leanings? See the Deep Dive “Are Republicans Coming around on EVs” for how this will change.
🔬Markets & Research
🚕 What happens when Uber, Lyft, and others go fully electric? Short answer: a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, but an increase in criteria air pollutants and congestion.
🛴 A study from the National Center for Sustainable Transportation dove into micromobility use in the US. As usual, the answer to whether micromobility substitutes for private car usage or public and active transit is…it depends.
🙀 A new Queensland University study published in Transportation Research finds that motorists perceive cyclists with helmets as “less human” than those without. Chalk one up for Immanuel Kant.
🛺 Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) launched its 2023 EV outlook. The rapid electrification of 2- and 3-wheelers has displaced about 4x more barrels of oil than the electrification of passenger cars.
♻️ A new study from Worcester Polytechnic Institute identified how recycled batteries may outperform new ones. This is just the first inning of what’s possible in battery recycling.
🛫 MIT is working on a megawatt drive system for zero-emissions aviation. Irrespective of the fuel type (electric, hydrogen, etc.), the consensus is that electric motors in aviation will need to be significantly more powerful.
📚 The first UNFCCC Global Stocktake to evaluate collective progress towards the Paris Climate Agreement is now live. 1,600 documents all compiled in one place for your reading pleasure.
🏭 Corporates & Later Stage
🏗️ Toyota is adopting Tesla’s gigacasting process. Tesla has generally been a decade or two ahead of other carmakers on R&D and a decade or two behind on manufacturing. After many false starts (Elon Musk once fretted about assembly robots moving so quickly so as to encounter air resistance), Tesla’s establishing genuine manufacturing credentials.
⛴️ Cargo ships are bolstering their fuel efficiency with wind power. For a primer on how wind power is one tool in the toolkit, see Vol 29’s Deep Dive The Big Picture on Maritime Decarbonization.
🇶🇦 Qatar Airways CEO admits the aviation industry might miss its 2050 net zero goal. The short-sightedness of the likes of Qatar Airways and Boeing may give a market opportunity to a challenger in the same way that GM and Volkswagen’s short-sightedness gave Tesla an opening.
📦 UPS workers have authorized a strike, which could become the largest American work stoppage since 1959. UPS is a lynchpin in goods delivery that few could have imagined half a century ago.
🔑 Uber is launching peer-to-peer carsharing. Not great news for publicly-traded Getaround.
🐣 Startups & Early Stage
🚁 Boeing became the sole owner of eVTOL startup Wisk. Still waiting on news from Boeing about their serious decarbonization efforts.
💰VinFast is launching a “special” aftersales support program for its US EV customers. All car company launches are difficult; most are deadly.
🎲 Nikola is laying off about a quarter of its staff. Its scramble to get shareholders to approve issuing new shares continues.
🛻 Telo Trucks (Vol 54) is hoping that Americans are ready for “minimum viable pickup”. It’s cute but the landscape of 4 wheeled micromobility is littered with corpses.
DEEP DIVE Tesla’s Supercharging Flywheel Definitively Entered Hyperdrive
In October 2022, the Volume 38 Deep Dive asked the question: Is Tesla’s Supercharger Flywheel Entering Hyperdrive? At the time, Tesla had just allowed Tesla drivers to head outside the Supercharger network for DC fast charging and had announced its willingness to open up its Supercharger network to other car companies. Tesla’s change in policy was driven by competitive dynamics as well as a desire to be eligible for newly-announced federal infrastructure funding.
At the time, it looked like Tesla had developed a potential flywheel:
Fast forward to June of 2023, and this flywheel is definitively working. The dam broke on May 25, 2023, when Ford announced a double whammy. Not only would it pay Tesla for Ford drivers to get access to the Supercharger network, but it would adopt the Tesla charging standard for upcoming vehicles and effectively abandon the CCS standard that every major automaker except Tesla was supporting.
The announcement completely upended the entire EV charging ecosystem in the US. For example:
General Motors announced on June 9 that it would follow Ford’s path
The federal government will have to clarify its rules around federal infrastructure plans like NEVI, as they had been predicated on the CCS standard
Every single EV charging manufacturer and operator was asked whether they would be supporting the Tesla standard and whether they would abandon CCS
CCS consortium CharIN slammed Ford’s decision
The good folks over at EVAdoption are maintaining an ongoing list of where everyone stands right now. What does this look like in terms of both EV sales volume and EV charger networks?
It means that it’s game over for anyone who doesn’t want to use the Tesla standard. For automakers and network operators that haven’t made a declaration, like Stellantis, Mercedes, and Electrify America, their decision has already been made for them.