Tesla co-founder JB Straubel has built an EV-battery colossus in the scrublands of Nevada. He spent the day giving me the first look at everything @redwoodmat has been building.

It starts with *30 acres* of old batteries headed headed for recycling 🧵 Redwood's industrial campus is a 300-acre slope of buildings in various stages of completion. We followed cell phones and EV batteries recycled into 2500-pound bags of fluffy white lithium, then re-made into delicate foils and cathode CAM—the most valuable EV components 2/

Today we dug into the EV laggards — countries adopting EVs slower than you'd expect based on factors like wealth, new-car sales, urbanicity, industry.

US & South Korea are slowpokes among the 31 post-tipping-point countries — but another country wears the true laggard crown 🧵 Japan is the biggest EV laggard. It meets all the conditions that should make it a frontrunner in EVs. Instead, fully electric vehicles made up a measly 1.8% of new cars sold last year 2/
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This gorgeous new BBC chart shows how the coldest days on Earth now are warmer than the hottest days before the 1980s.

You know who predicted this would happen with near-perfect precision? Exxon Mobil scientists, in an internal report in 1982. Two versions of the same chart:

Here’s another from @exxonmobil 1982. It predicted that in 2023, our atmospheric CO2 would reach roughly 415 parts per million, raising the global average surface temperature ~1.1 degrees C.

Update: Average CO2 in 2023 was just over 420 PPM and the average temp anomaly 1.18C 2/

The fast part of the tech-adoption curve is happening now with electric vehicles. This is the period when preferences rapidly flip, and EVs can surge from 5% to 25% of new cars in just four years.

Five more countries just passed the tipping point. 1/ bloom.bg/3qXW6hw
Successful new technologies—TVs, mobile phones, LED lightbulbs—follow an S-shaped adoption curve.

Sales move at a crawl in the early-adopter phase, then surprisingly quickly go mainstream. EV sales rose 55% for tipping-point countries last quarter 2/
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Tesla has started a price war between battery and internal combustion engine cars, and it's just getting started🧵 Last year Tesla's Model Y became one of the top three SUVs in America, even though it cost more than twice as much as the RAV4 and Honda CR-V. After Tesla's 5th round of price cuts in 2023, that cost barrier has been reduced to a speed bump 2/

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If you want to predict how much Tesla’s cheapest car will cost at any given time, you just have to know one thing: the average price paid for a new vehicle in the US. Only $300 separates the two figures, on average 1/ bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Tesla's floating-price strategy is unique to the automotive world and is about to get a lot more scrutiny after yesterday's miss on Q4 deliveries. I've been looking into Tesla's price moves and what might we might learn from them 2/
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ChatGPT saved me an hour of spreadsheet work today. It wrote a complex sorting script beyond my ability, explained how it works, and helped me deploy it.

The party tricks have been fun, but this was a whoa moment for me similar to the first time I used Google Search. Some are asking if I could share the prompt that I used. But that's just it—I'm not an expert in Excel and it wasn't a single well-written prompt. It was more like a long chat with an Excel expert who was eager to help.

Tesla is about to start selling its electric semi, and it's time to start talking about the biggest challenge for the industry: high-voltage grid interconnections. It's a big deal that could stall electrification of all vehicles if things don't change 🧵 National Grid just released an important study about future power needs on highways. By 2030, half of the fuel stops examined would top 5MW peak demand, a threshold that triggers major upgrades that take 4-8 years to build and cost tens of millions $$ 2/ bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

The world has reached an Edison-level moment for electricity—everything from solar and batteries to electric motorcycles and heat pumps. We've identified 10 tipping points to show what comes next 🧵1/ bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-… The US hit the 5% tipping point for renewable energy a decade ago. Since then, wind and solar have climbed to 20% of power capacity. If the US follows the countries that came before it, the next decade could bring 50% renewables—well ahead of forecasts 2/ bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-…

Interesting EV tax credit details in the new Manchin deal: $7.5k credit per new vehicle and $4k for a used EV (or 30% of price, whichever is less). The credits expire at the end of 2032—with no manufacturer caps. A bunch of new limitations include 🧵1/ Income requirements for EV tax credits:
$7.5k new vehicle credit: max $150k income ($300k for joint filers)
$4k used vehicle credit: max $75k income ($150k for joint filers)
Also 2/

The US has finally crossed the EV tipping point—the period when technological preferences rapidly flip from early adopters to mainstream demand. If it follows the 18 countries that came before it, a quarter of new cars could be fully electric in 2025 1/ bloomberg.com/news/articles/… The idea is that while the early slow part of tech adoption varies a lot, market behavior tends to converge once things take off. That appears to happen around 5% market share for fully electric vehicles. Here are the countries where that's happened 2/ bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

There are some crazy misconceptions out there about crime in NYC. Yes, crime has increased since the pandemic, but the city is still much safer than most of America 1/ NYC's murder rate of 5.5 per 100,000 last year is lower than the state averages for Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, S. Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, Illinois, New Mexico, Georgia, Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Oklahoma, Michigan, North Carolina, cont..

Tesla just won some new bragging rights: Its Fremont factory cranked out more cars last year than any other auto plant in North America 1/ bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-… Tesla's Fremont factory was originally built by GM in the 1960s and was operated by a joint venture with Toyota until after GM's 2009 bankruptcy. This was the first time Tesla exceeded the old peak 2/ bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-…

Wow. The U.S. just posted an massive jump in vaccinations. There were 4.6 million shots registered for a single day. That's almost 60% more than the previous record. It pushed the 7-day average to 2.5 million/day for the first time 1/ bloomberg.com/graphics/covid… It's not exactly clear what's driving the record number. J&J's new shot certainly contributed. But that doesn't account for everything—*cumulative* J&J vaccinations are up to 1.19 million. Not every state set a new vaccinations record—but a lot did 2/

💉Vaccine Update💉
For the first time, the U.S. recorded 2 million doses administered in a single day. It's the third straight record, bringing the 7-day avg to 1.43m/day.

Global also set a new record at 4.7m/day. Totals:
🌏128M
🇺🇸 40.5M
bloomberg.com/graphics/covid… 1/ A bit of good news for Canada 🇨🇦. After reported supply issues with manufacturers, the vaccination campaign nearly ground to a halt last week but seems to be ramping up again: 25k doses recorded today, bringing the 7-day average up to 15.8k/day 2/ bloomberg.com/graphics/covid…

💉Vaccine Update💉

We added a new feature to the tracker today that's been a personal obsession. We show how long it will take to get to herd immunity based on current vaccination rates— broken down by state/province/country. It's pretty revealing 1/ bloomberg.com/graphics/covid… Check out Israel, the world leader in vaccinations. At its current rate of, 75% of the country could be fully vaccinated in just two months 2/ bloomberg.com/graphics/covid…

Did we just hit peak oil? Today I went deep on how the future of energy snuck up on us in 2020: 11 charts, 3500 words, 9 photos. You should really check it out, but I will try to distill it here 1/ bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-… It starts with a forecast by one of the world’s biggest oil majors. This year BP made an extraordinary call—that oil energy demand may never again return to 2019 levels. That’s not some 2040 “Implausibly Green” scenario. It’s their business-as-usual 2/ bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-…

Part IV is finally here: The season finale from the biggest public survey of Tesla owners ever conducted. Today we focus on the future of the Model 3 and the market for electric cars 1/ bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-… First we look at what kinds of cars people are trading in for the Model 3. The gray dots are notable because 2/
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The Tesla Model 3 Survey: In Part III of our survey of 5,000 owners, we take a close look at Autopilot—the good, the bad, the ugly, the life-saving 1/ bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-… This is the messy middle ground in the transition to self-driving cars. We heard hundreds of stories where Tesla’s Autopilot put people in danger—and where it rescued them from it. More than 90% of owners said Autopilot makes them safer 2/
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🎃Part II: Tesla Model 3 Survey Results🎃
Today we published the second installment of our survey of 5,000 Tesla owners: customer service and charging 1/
bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-… First, check out the number of service visits a new owner requires to fix problems that came with their car. Super impressive trend—but this is more about Tesla getting better at making cars, not improving service (see part 1: bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-…) 2/

🚨Bloomberg's Tesla Model 3 Survey results🚨

In May, we started asking Model 3 owners about what it's like to own a Tesla, and they had a *lot* to say. We’ve crunched 500,000 words of feedback into four days of findings. Today is Part 1: Quality 1/ bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-… First up: Tesla is getting better at making cars. Many early Model 3s were marred by defects, which peaked at 80 issues per 100 cars in Q3 2018. A year later, Q3 defects had dropped by 44%. Here’s a monthly breakdown 2/ bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-…