Driving with Dunne

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. Autel Energy North America aims to lift the “joy meter” of charging by delivering high quality chargers to both homes and public charging stations. John Thomas, COO, tells us how.

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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 are in stop and go traffic delivering kids to school or going to work. In a recent survey of iPhone users, 67% of respondents said that their next car must offer Apple Carplay compatibility or they would look somewhere else. This is very good news for Apple of course. And for Google Play. And to Tesla. But it could be disastrous news for legacy automakers who continue to struggle with software development and execution. Richard Windsor, leading global expert on future technology, calls it an existential crisis.

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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 founders in lithium mining from Australia to South America to North Carolina where he now lives. In this episode, we learn why lithium prices exploded in 2022. And where they are likely to head over the next five years.

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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 Kingdom, is a tour de force that traces the relationship between the United States and China over the past 220 years. It is a relationship that shifts from wonderfully warm to icy cold and back -- over and over and over again. Pomfret's newest book, From Warsaw With Love, takes us to Central Europe to uncover the special relationship between the the spy networks in Warsaw and Washington. This relationship has never been more important, given Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's unrelenting efforts to swing Europe in its favor. Pomfret is smart, direct and street-smart.

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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 is unprecedented. Remember that Japanese and Korean automakers worked for decades before gathering the resources and the courage to put their products to the test with American consumers. How did VinFast get ready so quickly? And how does the little-known company plan to win the trust of American car buyers? In this episode, CEO Thuy Le walks us through the pivotal early days of VinFast. We also discover how she carves aside time for a special hobby that requires 4:30am wakeups.

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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 thousands of people in the battery industry: founders, engineers, investors, policy makers and more. Yen Yeh and Linda Jing host Battery Brunch weekly on Saturday mornings. There are more than 20,000 Battery Brunch members and between 500 and 1,000 people attend every session. In this week's Driving With Dunne podcast, we learn what inspired Yen and Linda to found battery brunch. And how the organization is accelerating the development of the global ecosystem around batteries.

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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 iPhones and iPads, is the manufacturer of the final product. This marks an important step in Foxconn's ambitions to weave itself into the fabric of American industry. The relationship also allows Lordstown to work with Foxconn MIH to develop other future vehicles from a single platform. What this means for Joe or Jane pickup truck customer: Potentially many more affordable choices for American consumers beyond the offerings from legacy players in Detroit, Wolfsburg, Seoul and Tokyo.
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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 but now they are woven together with other ways to get around. This movement has been led by a cast of highly impressive women like Anne Hildago, Mayor of Paris and Sophie Haestorp Anderson Lord Mayor of Copenhangen. We can now add a new star to this list: Elke van den Brandt, Minister of Mobility for Brussels. Elke joins us today to tell the story of how she and her team in Brussels are opening up the city to many forms of transportation, safer and quieter streets and cleaner air.

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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 division. Darren reports to Doug Field, recently recruited from Apple, and Field reports to CEO Jim Farley. Put another way, Darren is way up there at Ford and knows the Lightning specs and performance better than anyone on the planet. In this week's Driving With tDunne conversation, I ask Darren a simple but tough question. If I choose the Lighting over the gasoline F-150, what am I gaining -- and what am I giving up? Palmer shares some remarkable data bophut F-150 Lightning customers. More than half of them never owned a Ford before. And close to 80% had never owned an electric vehicle. Palmer makes the compelling argument that the Lightning is a new product category, fundamentally different from the F-150s powered by engines. This episode lets you listen to Darren and make your own conclusions.

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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 America's charging networks. How reliable, how fast, how convenient? In this episode Kristin recounts the highs and lows of the cross-country drive. And she also gives a grade to American's EV charging networks as they stand today. And what American can be doing to speed the pace of change to cleaner, greener, cheaper energy.

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