The Electric Vehicle Revolution Is On, and It’s Going to Change Everything

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:16)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:19)

Tracy, you know, there's this weird thing going on. There's always weird things going on.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

Yeah, I was gonna say, you have to narrow it down.

Joe Weisenthal (0:27)

I'm gonna narrow it down. There's this weird thing going on right now where investors are really excited about car companies, even though car companies are like barely selling any cars these days because of the chip shortage.

Tracy Alloway (0:42)

Yeah, I have noticed this, too.

Particularly, by the way, over in China, like there is just a massive amount of capital moving into cars at the moment, but it's concentrated in one particular type of car, which would be, you know, electric vehicles or some sort of hybrid plug-in type things. Like, we have seen so much money move into that space recently, and I think part of it is the enthusiasm for tech that we saw last year, right? People are looking for those big structural shifts, and the idea of electric cars is definitely one of those things.

Joe Weisenthal (1:23)

The weird thing, though, too, and, you know, I'll move it back to the US perspective for a second, is like, okay, everyone knows, like, Tesla. It's done sort of this way out, was way out ahead of this space.

And the legacy automakers have, you know, are catching up, and they're rolling out more and more electric vehicles. But, like, they're getting a lot of credit for it. At least recently, like, forward past $100 billion. It's not like these companies are, like, crushing it yet, as far as I can tell, on the EVs. But they're getting a lot of credit for it.

And as you mentioned, sales exploding in China. It's just investors not only seem to really like, be bullish on EVs, but really just think, like, there's going to be tons of winners in this space. It's a lot of optimism.

Tracy Alloway (2:06)

Yeah, well, it kind of begs the question as well. Like, how much does it take for an old school car company to convert itself into an electric vehicle manufacturer? And here, I have to admit, I really don't know anything about the technical differences between building a gas-powered car versus an electric car.

But it seems to me like you cannot just flip a switch and suddenly go into procuring batteries and making EVs. So I'm very curious how much of this narrative about the old school auto companies suddenly becoming EV manufacturers, how much of that is hype versus reality?

Joe Weisenthal (2:50)

There's so many questions I have on that. Like, one of the themes that we've talked to on many episodes, especially with advanced manufacturing, is this idea of like, sort of like tacit knowledge, is something Dan Wong talks a lot about. It's something we've talked a lot about on our semiconductor episodes. Like, do you just have the institutional knowledge to build these things?

And then you're right, like, there are different processes. I remember we had a good story a couple of years ago about the unions in Germany being very anxious about the EV transition because there are fewer parts. In theory, that means fewer workers. So all kinds of huge questions about how this is going to work and what the EV transformation will look like.

And like you, I really just like don't know much about this stuff, but it's happening so fast that I think we better catch up.

Tracy Alloway (3:36)

Yeah, let's do it.

Joe Weisenthal (3:38)

Let's do it. I am very excited for today's guest. We are going to be speaking to Nat Bullard. He is the Chief Content Officer at BloombergNEF and one of the most knowledgeable people here at Bloomberg about all types of things, EV, energy transitions, energy tech, cars and all of it.

Nat, thank you so much for joining us.

Nathaniel Bullard (4:00)

Joe and Tracy, thank you for having me.

As they used to say in radio, long time listener, first time caller. So a treat to be here.

Joe Weisenthal (4:08)

Thank you so much. So to get it right off the bat, like the EV revolution is on, right? Like this is happening.

Nathaniel Bullard (4:15)

That's right. I mean, we're right now at a position of, let's see, 10 years ago, less than a 10th of a percent sales of global cars were electric.

And in the third quarter of last year, it was 10% globally. And there is, of course, some regional difference within that, as you can imagine.

China finished the year in December at more than 20% EV sales, and that's the world's biggest car market. That was 3.3 million EVs sold.