Driving with Dunne

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 picture of the global lithium mining industry. She shares her point of view on why the Inflation Reduction Act is mostly a good thing for the battery industry, why China dominates global battery supply chains and how she came to name her company Luna Lithium.

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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 Vehicle. DeLorenzo parks a small electric car in the driveway that cost him less than $20,000 after incentives. How did he do it?

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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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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, the two most transformative technologies of our era. Getting there means killing sacred cows and making tough calls. Under Barra's leadership, GM exited many markets around the world, including long-standing GM outposts in Europe, Australia, India and South Africa. This has freed up capital to concentrate investments in the all-important Ultium battery platform and Cruise, the highly innovative autonomous vehicle subsidiary based in San Francisco. Will Barra's monumental efforts to put GM on a new, winning trajectory succeed? Author Welch gives success an 80% change, provided that GM can shake an apparent generational jinx that has best the automaker since the 1990s.

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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 impossible possible." VinFast will start delivering their all electric vehicles to markets in America, the Netherlands, France and Germany by the end of the year. In this episode Dunne gathers with Chris Donovan, the producer of the Driving With Dunne podcast, to share what he saw and heard on the ground in Vietnam. Listen to find out why Vietnam is fast-becoming the darling among investors looking at destinations in Asia beyond China.

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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 dimensions. The single biggest advantage of holography is safety. The driver does not need to look away toward the center stack screen where he or she might seek to secure information about navigation or speed. Instead holograms render objects in the line of sight, embedded into the road and its real surroundings.. Envisic's holograms are expected to appear on Cadillac Lyriqs in late 2022 ro 2023. Founder Jamieson Christmas earned a PhD at Cambridge and is convinced that his technology will win widespread adoption simply because it is safer and more intuitive than looking at those giant touch screens that now dominate many of our vehicles from Teslas to Lucids to F-150 Lightnings.

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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 Octillion, has been at the forefront of the battery business since the late 1990s. In this episode, Beach recounts how he witnessed massive investment in lithium ion batteries in Japan, then in Korea and most recently in China. As a result, North Asia accounts for more than 90% of global battery production today. But change is afoot. Tens of billions dollars of fresh investments are going into new battery plants in Europe and the United States. What do America and Europe need to do to close the gap with Asia? Who will be the eliminate winner on the global battery arms race? And what is the next great innovation in batteries?

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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 of Sila Nanotechnologies. In 2022, Sila won a landmark contract to supply batteries to the exclusive Mercedes G Wagon, starting in 2025. Berdichevsky's deep expertise in developing silicon-based anodes has attracted investors from every time zone. Sila is currently valued at more than. $3 billion. Sila is one leader among a wave of new battery startups in America that are positioned to help the United States close the battery capabilities gap with China.

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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? Much depends on the success of the Ultium battery platform. "Before GM got too far down the road in EVs, it had to figure out how to turn a profit on EVs," says Car and Driver. So, at the heart of GM's strategy for leadership in EVs is a brand new battery architecture called the Ultium Platform. In this week's Driving With Dunne podcast I am joined by Tim Grewe, Director of Electrification at General Motors. Mr Grewe takes us inside the world of the Ultium platform to show how it is designed to give GM a decisive edge over the competition when it comes to costs, range, reliability and safety.

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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 address? Joining the conversation is Ken Wilcox, Ruth's husband. Ken loves his gasoline-powered Audi TTs. Ken finds that electric cars are lacking when it comes to the emotional joys of driving and shifting gears in a car powered by an engine that you can feel and hear. Ruth confesses to missing her beloved Saab, too. You will really enjoy the point-counterpoint (he-said-she-said) flow of our conversation this week on the Driving With Dunne podcast.

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