AV and EV updates

Issue #77, April 30, 2021

Autonomous and electric vehicles are a hot topic in the automotive industry. What is the threshold to be crossed for the safety of AVs before their mass adoption is a question for policy makers. Charging station network continues to be a catch-22 situation and a bottleneck for EV adoption. EV makers sign up with partners to offer a network of charging stations with real time status visibility to address the range anxiety faced by consumers. Car makers like Tesla talk about how they are becoming more of an AI company. Ford's move towards setting up its own battery making facility is a step towards vertical integration. Here are some recent updates specific to the AV and EV segment in the auto industry.

AVs and their safety limits

Although AV technology promises numerous benefits, concerns over safety and trust have become the defining issue. The industry recognizes this. “People are ready to embrace new vehicle technology, especially if it will make driving safer,” said Greg Brannon, AAA’s director of automotive engineering and industry relations. The promises are many years, if not decades, from being realized. A reasonable timeline for when AVs should be rolled out en masse is when they are at least as safe as the average driver. As soon as AVs exceed this threshold, then not only would we reap all their economic and social benefits, but we would also be saving lives. Unfortunately, the broad acceptance of just-better-than-average AVs may be undermined by a host of psychological biases that fester in the minds of consumers. - WSJ

The EV chicken-or-egg story

Most electric-vehicle drivers charge their cars at home, so many public charging stations get little use. But lots of people still driving gasoline-powered cars won’t consider going electric until they see charging stations widely deployed, for fear that they will run out of juice on the road. Biden’s plan to spend $15 billion to help create 500,000 more public stations by 2030 is feeding the optimism, with investors flocking to EV charging companies since his election. The risk is that the early movers will get badly burned, potentially souring capital markets on the industry for years to come. - Bloomberg

GM's plans for EV charging station network

The three biggest barriers to EV adoption are the cost of the vehicles, access to charging and time to charge, according to multiple studies. GM and other automakers are trying to address the cost with new purpose-built EVs with improved batteries. But charger access and charging times remain a major issue. Like Tesla and Ford, GM is trying to improve access with the Ultium Charge 360 network that will include 60,000 publicly available chargers across the U.S. and Canada. It has signed up 7 partners - Blink Charging, ChargePoint, EV Connect, EVgo, FLO, Greenlots and SemaConnect. GM EV customers should be able to see real-time status information from all of the chargers on the app. - Forbes

Tesla as an AI company

According to Elon Must, Tesla will be remembered in future not just as an electric-vehicle and renewable-energy pioneer, but also as an AI and robotics company. He bases this on a belief that it is close to cracking the challenge of self-driving cars using just eight cameras, machine learning and a computerized brain in the car that reacts with superhuman speed. He calls full self-driving “one of the hardest technical problems…that’s maybe ever existed”. - The Economist

Ford's own battery facility

Ford announced plans to invest $185 million into a new battery lab as a step toward manufacturing its own battery cells for EVs. The funds will go toward constructing Ford Ion Park, a 200,000-square-foot production “pilot facility” that’s expected to open by the end of next year in Detroit. Ford’s new facility will not be a full battery cell production facility like Tesla has or General Motors has announced as part of recent $4.6 billion investments in the U.S. - CNBC

The continuing chip shortage

Global auto makers who had expected the semiconductor supply crisis to subside in the spring are now warning that chips will remain scarce for months while a second-half recovery is fraught with uncertainty. The main causes of the worsening shortage are the widespread chip manufacturing disruption in Texas from the severe weather in February and a fire at Japan’s Renesas Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. on March 19 that halted production, ripping a hole in the global supply. That has left car makers searching for chips needed for on-board electronics, safety systems such as automatic braking, and infotainment consoles. - WSJ