We all have 20:20 vision when it comes to hindsight - but foresight is much rarer. However, reflecting on what Mr Levi Tillemann recounted back in 2015 as to the then nascent electric vehicle revolution might well equip you, as it has me, with a better sense of what could happen next.
His book 'The Great Race' is about people, politics and policy - writ large on the world stage. How has China come to increasingly dominate the global industrial landscape and what were the tipping point moments in that story? You'll find the detailed answers in the book and an overview of what's been going on in my conversation with Levi.
He's an internationally recognised thought-leader in clean energy and mobility. VP for Policy and International Outreach at Ample. Sr. Advisor to Valence Strategic. Fmr. WEF. Guest contributor at WIRED, The New Yorker, Washington Post and regular commentator on NPR. Skilled in Mobility, Clean Energy, International Relations, Fundraising, Climate Change, and Policy Analysis.
We all have 20:20 vision when it comes to hindsight - but foresight is much rarer. However, reflecting on what Mr Levi Tillemann recounted back in 2015 as to the then nascent electric vehicle revolution might well equip you, as it has me, with a better sense of what could happen next.
His book 'The Great Race' is about people, politics and policy - writ large on the world stage. How has China come to increasingly dominate the global industrial landscape and what were the tipping point moments in that story? You'll find the detailed answers in the book and an overview of what's been going on in my conversation with Levi.
He's an internationally recognised thought-leader in clean energy and mobility. VP for Policy and International Outreach at Ample. Sr. Advisor to Valence Strategic. Fmr. WEF. Guest contributor at WIRED, The New Yorker, Washington Post and regular commentator on NPR. Skilled in Mobility, Clean Energy, International Relations, Fundraising, Climate Change, and Policy Analysis.
Hello and welcome to the Electric and Eclectic Podcast Show with Roger Atkins and some truly smart and amazingly interesting guests.
Speaker 2:But it would be a mistake to think that America's technological dominance is somehow insured by the innovative capacity of Silicon Valley or the excellence of our research universities or the leadership of California's governments. Indeed, political dysfunction in Washington poses a serious threat to our competitive position. Nonetheless, america is still very much in the running. Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin.
Speaker 3:I like to try and be on time as best I can. I'm very focused on punctuality, but, oh my word, I have to apologize for being very, very late With a conversation we're about to have with Levi Tillerman talking about an amazing book that was published actually back in 2015. But, to my mind, the book the Great Race, which Levi is going to tell us all about shortly, is so pertinent to what's happening today. It gives incredible clues to exactly what I think will and should happen next and, despite the fact that it's hurtling towards a decade ago, yeah, it's a very prescient book of these times. So will you accept my apology for inviting you onto the Electric and Eclectic podcast show nearly a decade late to talk about your book? Am I forgiven, levi?
Speaker 2:Roger, I cannot tell you how thrilled I was to get your message on LinkedIn and to hear that you're enjoying the book, because I spent quite a bit of time writing it. It was sort of my first effort to put something out into the public conversation as a young man and to hear that it had stood the test of time and someone who I admire as much as I do you was finding real value in it. Almost a decade later, that just felt really good.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm quite positive that lots of people are going to find resonance with the book, inspiration with the book and many other things. But should we start with you just giving us a quick vignette of who you are, what you've done and where you are today before we start getting into the book? And, by the way, if you could get a copy of the book to hand, I would like to ask you to read a couple of passages from it at some point, not right now, but at some point in the conversation. But yeah, please tell my listener who you are and what you do.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so, I would say. In my heart and heart, I am an environmentalist, and when I was a young man I was always fascinated with ecosystems. I spent a lot of time mucking around in the ponds around my house catching frogs and turtles, and as I got older I started to look at the environmental challenges confronting the world and think about where I could have an impact a positive impact, with respect to those challenges. And so I picked the mobility space, and over the last 20 years now I'm getting old I have done a variety of different things focused on decarbonizing mobility. So I wrote a PhD on industrial policy for innovation in clean energy and especially focused on the automotive industry.
Speaker 2:I worked for the Obama Administration Energy Department as a political appointee. I wrote this book with Simon and Schuster called the Great Race the Global Quest for the Carp of Future, and I've written for a number of other publications as well, prominently Wired and the New Yorker, and published a lot of op-eds here and there on emerging issues in the EV space. For a while I had a consulting company and then I took a sort of detour to run for Congress right after Donald Trump got elected.
Speaker 2:I decided to put my money where my mouth was and that was unsuccessful.
Speaker 2:So that's the bad part.
Speaker 2:But the good part is shortly thereafter I ended up in Switzerland working at the World Economic Forum where I was setting up a program on circular economy and the automotive industry for them, and that was just a fascinating exploration of the materials and business model and policy aspects of circular economy for automobiles, and for a boy who grew up in Colorado, working in Switzerland was like a purmination, so that part wasn't too bad either.
Speaker 2:I left the World Economic Forum to move to San Francisco to take a role as vice president for a battery swapping company, and I think both of us are big fans of the concept of battery swapping. We know that there are a lot of challenges to implementing battery swapping on kind of an economy-wide scale, but there are certainly a lot of use cases where battery swapping is extremely compelling and it has a lot of benefits for the grid and things like that, and so we're sort of the vanguard of that in the United States. It's obviously a much bigger industry in China, and so I'm currently vice president for policy and international affairs at Ample, which is that battery swapping company.
Speaker 3:Levi Tillerman, I could say so much about what you've just described there, your journey, but I'm going to say one word Wow, that is one heck of a journey. And I think when you mentioned the business about Congress, you didn't fail, my friend. You succeeded because you succeeded in having the confidence, the belief in yourself and the passion to want to be in a place to make a difference. So, my friend, that's a story of success all the way through and I think for anyone listening, taking a chance, having a go, looking at things and being kind of eclectic, if you like, in your life is probably a good reason for having you on the podcast with the name that it's got. It is, I think, a very good life lesson. So, thank you for all that.
Speaker 3:We'll come back to some of those things, For sure we're going to come back to. In fact, we'll conclude on battery swapping, because I think you and I have had many points in time where we've kind of bumped into each other on this proposition of battery swapping, so I'm going to leave it Absolutely. Yeah, I'm going to leave it for that on that subject until the conclusion. But let's go into the book then. What inspired you to write a book. Anyone who does that and I haven't, but I know people like you and others who have it's an incredible commitment. It's a labor of love. There is no guarantee that it'll even get published, let alone read. So what gave you the impetus and inspiration to write a book?
Speaker 2:Well, in a sense I had a little bit of an unfair leg up. When I was in graduate school at Johns Hopkins, I got a job as a research assistant for a gentleman named Daniel Jurgen.
Speaker 2:You may be familiar with him, he's a sort of senior vice president at S&T Global. But I mean, dan has cast a much larger shadow on the energy industry than that. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner and he publishes these gorgeously written tones on the energy world, and I was always.
Speaker 2:I was a huge fan of Dan's when I was in grad school and I ended up getting a job as his kind of research and writing assistant when he was writing the quest.
Speaker 2:So we spent 10 years excuse me, we spent five years together working on the quest, and after I kind of graduated from that project, I had a pretty good sense as to how to write a good book on fairly technical, potentially dry topics, but pulling in the geopolitics, pulling in the personalities, talking through some of the technical aspects of things that were actually very interesting but, if explained incorrectly, could be kind of dry. And so when I went back to work on my PhD dissertation after the quest had published, I decided to write it with an eye towards eventually publishing it as a book. And of course, a popular book like the one that I eventually published, that won't serve as a PhD dissertation. The dissertation has to be much more analytical. There's a lot of theory that goes into it. But the dissertation serves as a great framework for writing a popular book, because you understand everything at a much deeper analytical level than you might if you're going straight for the kind of more popular work.
Speaker 3:Yeah, wow, and the thing you've kind of alluded to there in that motivation and that opportunity and approach. What I take from the book, what I really like about the book, is the way it contextualizes things. It's not just a chronology of events. You met with people, you interviewed people, like all good journalists and researchers, and then it contextualizes things. So for me it's given me many kind of senses of well, how did we get here that America in fact has been the leader in so many of these things but failed to follow through and in many aspects of, for example, the combustion engine car was both created, was manufactured at scale, and then the fueling infrastructure was put together, how that worked technically, socially, strategically. It's uncannily like where we are now with the electric vehicle proposition and I'm not trying to make this a pro America proposition, but America being all of what it is, particularly in and around innovation, engineering technology, all of this, all of this stuff. It's quite, it's almost shocking in a way to read how far many of the things that we're talking about in the electric vehicle arena had been progressed by America. But then they stopped and kind of they've let the Japanese, they clearly let the Chinese and many others sort of take over through changing in policy, changing in administration? I mean, look, you're intimate with all of this.
Speaker 3:Can we dive into the book, chapter 15, which is called Cataclysm the Demons of Fukushima? As it happens, I was with Andy Palmer only the other day and we were talking about lots of things having a catch up on the year, talking about what's going to happen next year, etc. Andy was in very much the driving seat of Nissan at this time and could I ask you to and he's familiar with all of this, of course, but lots of people listening might not be familiar Can I ask you to read the second paragraph on page 196? Those two paragraphs there? This is for you listening to this. What you're about to hear is an aspect of what went on in Japan as a consequence of the tsunami that now has massive relevance to today and what's going to happen next with batteries and energy. Could you do that? Read those two paragraphs?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, I will jump in. Thank you. Together with Meti, nissan sought out a means of using Japan's fleet of EVs to aid in recovery. Roads had been destroyed and gasoline could not be shipped to some of the hardest hit regions. However, in many of those areas, electricity was restored much sooner, so Nissan dispatched a convoy of leafs to be used by doctors and rescue workers to aid in the recovery. Within weeks, nissan and Meti had started collaborating to accelerate plans to deploy a vehicle to home, or V to H system that would allow an EV to power a Japanese home for up to two days in case of a blackout. Electric vehicles, they reasoned, could be used as a strategic energy storage asset, making them even more attractive to Tokyo area residents weary of post quake blackouts. Within two years, about 10% of newly owners were purchasing the V to H units.
Speaker 3:My goodness, chronicling that moment in time. When you listen to the motivation for that, which was out of a profound well, use the word cataclysm. Let's call climate change the same thing, a cataclysm, in a similar fashion to the rationale behind who was Meti? By the way, you mentioned Meti there. What organization is that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Meti is probably partially because this came out of my PhD dissertation. I look a lot at institutions and how government institutions both drive innovation and shape policy and shape the international economy At the end of the day, how they shape our lives. So Meti is the ministry of economics, trade and industry which is probably either the most or the second most powerful government ministry in Japan. The minister for economics, trade and industry has a role within the Japanese society that is maybe analogous to our secretary of state or something like that, and the reason for that is the Japan's economy has, throughout modernity, really been driven by industrial policy, and the person who sits at the helm of that industrial policy ship is the minister of economics, trade and industry.
Speaker 3:Right, thank you. That puts it in context. The reason why I've asked you to read that particular passage out. Was it just jumped off the page at me? In relation to where we are now with bi-directional charging, where we are with companies like Femata Energy a company called Femata Energy in the United States really shouting loud about look at what fleets can do, look at what individual vehicles can do, look at how we can arbitrage renewable energy with this growing fleet of electric vehicle batteries and I know we're going to.
Speaker 2:Don. I think we see that much more broadly with electric vehicles and with various forms of automotive technology. You sort of see them rise up and then sometimes they continue to grow, Sometimes they wilt, but they come back a number of years later. And I think it was the American writer Mark Twain used to say that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And you see that rhyming, that technological rhyming throughout history. I call them Lazarus technologies, technologies that a lot of people sort of wrote off for dead, but then they come back to life and they end up making a huge difference in the world.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I love some of these references to great people of humanity of writing, particularly Another one I like which I think fits in this context. I think it was Robert Louis Stevenson. So, sooner or later, we all sit down to a banquet of consequences and you could argue that's what we're seeing revealed as climate change. But being able to do exactly what the Japanese scoped and realized deal with the catastrophe, deal with the cataclysm, find a way of using these new things called electric vehicles in a way over and above just being a way of getting from A to B being a vehicle yeah, I think it's quite amazing.
Speaker 2:So, and I'll say that on that note and again rhyming with a lot of the industrial policy that we see throughout the Great Race and throughout automotive history. If you look at California, the California Energy Commission and the California government has realized that the markets are not actually catalyzing the uptake of this kind of V to H technology on their own, and so the California Energy Commission has been now plowing a significant amount of money into catalyzing wide scale deployments of various V to H technologies, and I think that that's one of their next big priorities with respect to electrification, because they realize that the grid and the existing generation base it's just not up to the task of fully electrifying our automotive fleet, and so you need to have a much more sophisticated system that's able to transact with some of this energy and able to balance itself out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but that begs the big question, to my mind why did the Japanese conclude all this, albeit in a given situation, and why has it taken well over a decade for this even to be scoped into the protocol of charging with CCS or with NACs? Or I mean, it was in there in Chathamow from the get go, wasn't it? So what the heck has happened for well over a decade, my friend? Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, look, it's a question of how these assets are going to interact not just with a home but also with the grid, and there's a lot of complexity involved in being able to feed energy back into the grid not just technical complexity, but also regulatory complexity and business model complexity and understanding when those resources are going to be needed. Sending messages out to the various distributed assets that have the potential to feed that electricity back into the grid, and telling them we're going to need approximately this much energy at this time of the day, and doing that, you know, would lead times that allow you to actually make make a meaningful impact with respect to grid stability. That's all quite complicated and it's something that we haven't quite wrapped our arms around yet.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I agree with you and it isn't just technical, but in that regard, I know, when I was at Ricardo and, by the way, nice that I saw your references to Ricardo in there in terms of we're going to talk about trying at the moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah one of the greats.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, I mean, I wasn't an engineer and I worked there, but it was.
Speaker 2:it was a great baptism for me in terms of understanding, getting a semblance, getting a skim knowledge of engineering, challenge and capability, but one of the other things that I did very early in my career is I had an internal combustion engine startup and we spent quite a bit of time with Ricardo and AVL and FEV working on this more efficient internal combustion engine. So I have a great deal of respect for the institution. They really do remarkable engineering.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, you've definitely got a lot on me in many aspects, but certainly I recall the beginning of your book very poignantly, talking about your late father and talking about the ambition and the journey that you've had. And I think it's always lovely when you talk to somebody and you discover that one of the motivations from them yeah, absolutely comes from when they were a child, when they were young the inspiration of their mom or their dad or an uncle or an aunt or somebody in the family. And I think that there is a lovely and I'll let people read it for themselves. There's a lovely poignancy, an absolute context for who you are today and why you've been on this journey. And I think your late father, would you know I'm sure, is very, very proud of you. So that's nice too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I appreciate that, roger, and he was a huge inspiration and he was a brilliant dreamer and he always had these sorts of lights of fancy that he sought to engineer into reality.
Speaker 2:And, like yourself, I'm not actually an engineer, but because of the fact that I grew up in the family that I did and I spent so much time with my father, I actually have a number of patents and I've spent a lot of my life immersed in engineering, and so I sort of get away with some of the lingo and I do understand some of these concepts in a way that I simply wouldn't had I not been brought up with an adventure father. But yeah, I think you're right, those are sort of the two big forces that shaped my career. The one is my love of nature and the fact that I am sort of a died in the wool environmentalist, and the other is that I was brought up in this very technical household with a father who was constantly trying to engineer the world that he wanted to live in, and I guess that those both had a pretty big impact on where I ended up.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, and I think it's a great mix. And you may say he was a dreamer, but he's not the only one. I tried not to sing, where I know I tried not to sing it. But that's the important thing of imagination. I think one of the aspects of life that we all learn, if we're lucky, when we're young, is to imagine, is to have a dream, is to think that you can possibly do things that typically look very difficult or even impossible, because that's how we progressed as human beings, as a species, because people have tried to do new stuff.
Speaker 3:But anyway, let's get back to the book. So we go through a number of decades, we go through post-war, post-second World War activity in terms of what happened to Japan immediately after, what then happened to Korea, what was happening at the same time to the United States, etc. And it nicely chronicles some of those things. Some of them I was absolutely not aware of at all and it was like all right, so that's why that happened, I see. So Korea, I get it now, yeah, and of course, again referencing another war, sadly, the war in Korea. All of these things, as you write so beautifully, pivot around some of the technology development, some of the emerging massive companies that we know today, that began and were given, if you like, their impetus, unfortunately, as it were, but good for them by events that were wars.
Speaker 2:So yeah, that's-. Yeah. I think it was George's Doryo who was sort of one of the fathers of American venture capital and he said that war is really applied innovation, and it is true, it's a matter of life and death. And so you just end up moving farther faster than you would in a non-war time context.
Speaker 3:And I tell you what, though? When you reflect on that notion and you look at the behavior, for example, of someone like Elon Musk, it's as though he's running that business on a war footing, isn't it? Would that be fair to say that is so true?
Speaker 2:That is so true. I could not agree with you more. He brings an urgency to everything that he does which is unparalleled, and I think that there's a lot of good in that. There are also some problems that are created by Mr Musk's approach, but he does drive innovation like no one else, and I think that we have to give him credit for that.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, to go for a hat trick of quotations, the George Bernard Shaw quote about all progress relies on the unreasonable man. That applies to Musk, maybe more than anyone on the planet right now. Let's talk about China.
Speaker 2:Roger, we're going to have to put together a quote book together. Maybe that's our next project.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, I haven't checked this out ever, but I don't know if you have to pay some kind of money to someone for quoting famous people's work. I hope not, because I'd be broke by now. So, china, remind me. Forgive me for forgetting in the book. Did you meet Wang Gang? Did you meet him?
Speaker 2:So no, he was minister of science and technology at the time that I was writing the book. What I did was I was able to meet a number of journalists who had done long-form interviews with Wang Gang, and so I benefited from their extensive notes and I got a lot of background on Wang Gang that was not publicly available and not publicly known.
Speaker 3:Okay, Now we might have mentioned a mystery man to somebody listening. They're thinking, well, who the heck are they talking about? So this is a gentleman who actually joined Audi at a similar time to the time I joined Audi 1992, as I recall, as many Chinese engineers and all sorts of other people were doing going out into the world, making a contribution, but, of course, learning and taking that back to the mothership at some point. So tell everybody who Wang Gang was and in the context of what happens next after he binned Audi and went back to China.
Speaker 2:So Wang Gang is one of the what they call sea turtles in China, and I love that imagery. Because why do they call them sea turtles? Because they're Chinese who go abroad, usually for education or for work. They gather up knowledge, but then they always return to China, the beach that they were born on. And that's what sea turtles do they're born on a beach, they swim for thousands of miles and many years, and then they come back to lay eggs on the beach that they were born on.
Speaker 2:And so Wang Gang, as you mentioned, he ended up in Germany, he got a PhD there, he ended up at Audi and he actually ended up being a professor at a German university. But during that time period, he thought very deeply about the future of his own country and how China could grow its economy without destroying its environment and without completely overloading the global oil markets, because the demand for energy was going to be so massive that oil markets alone were not likely to be able to fulfill it. And so he came up with this thesis of electrification, and he spent quite a bit of time thinking about it on his own, and one day, when the then minister of science and technology I believe it was Xu Guanhua was touring an Audi factory. Wang Gang had been assigned as kind of his, his minder and tour guide, and he began talking with the minister of science and technology about his idea for how China could industrialize without exerting an undue impact on the environment and also how it could potentially leapfrog past the current generation of automotive technology in the West. The West was so far advanced compared to China with respect to internal combustion engines and emissions controls and fuel economy and things like that. That one, and, for that matter, xu Guanhua, didn't really think China had a chance to catch up within the context of traditional automotive technology. But if they invested heavily in electrification, there was the chance to leapfrog internal combustion engines technology and to become the global leader in automobiles so long as they were electric. And in fact that's exactly what China has done.
Speaker 2:It's funny because at the time that I published the book, china's EV program was in a little bit of disarray. They had sort of put a lot of resources into it and they weren't getting a lot of electric vehicles out of it. But the Chinese are very canyon. They went back to the drawing board. They surveyed their global competition. They looked at who was succeeding and who was failing and what were the technological and policy tools that they were using to succeed around the world, and they specifically studied California, which had a very sophisticated program for promoting automotive electrification. They adopted a lot of those policy tools and brought them home to China. I think it is unequivocal that those reforms set the stage for this massive boom in electrification that we've seen in China in the intervening years. China has now 50% 60% of global EV sales. They have leapfrogged the West and they have come to completely dominate global EV sales and also EV infrastructure installation.
Speaker 3:And supply chain of raw materials. And supply chain. Yeah, you've nicely queued up the next section I would love you to read. Please called the China.
Speaker 2:Select. I should probably mention one other thing about Wang Gang before we move on, which is ended up going back to China, where he was installed as head of a major university and eventually he was tapped to be minister of science and technology himself. And this was quite unexpected for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most obvious was that Wang Gang was not actually a member of the Chinese Communist Party, and it was a moment of sort of reform when the CCP was open to experimenting with different kinds of governance and different kinds of innovation, including policy innovation. So it was really sort of a rare thing that you should tap someone who is a non-communist to serve at that level within the Chinese government.
Speaker 3:Well, I think that's, I guess, an indication of what his passion was, his personality, his strategic thinking, which you've referenced a few times, but simply, I guess, the very fundamental fact the guy was very smart. He was an operator, absolutely yes yes, completely. But yeah, page 197,. Could you read that second paragraph for us please, the one that starts at the end of 2009.
Speaker 2:At the end of 2009, beijing announced a target of increasing the share of electric vehicles in overall domestic production to 10% in 2015. The government has also created a subsidy program to boost sales of electric vehicles by providing up to 60,000 yuan or 770,000 yen. That's about 8,800 US dollars per unit. Beijing has apparently decided to catapult the nation's auto industry into the electric age by skipping the transitional era of hybrids. China is bent on taking the leadership in car making by taking advantage of the revolution now taking shape in the industry. Japanese car makers need to respond to China's moves by developing electric vehicles that can compete favorably with rival Chinese offerings in this crucial market.
Speaker 3:And that, my friend, your words in 2015. When you reflect on where we are now, what I can't fathom is why, in Europe and the United States in particular not just your book, because there were other voices, there were other people, but Western leaders, and particularly OEMs, don't seem to have taken stock of all that you just described and all of the incredible detail that's laid out in the book. And at the same time, of course, there was a company that wasn't Chinese, there wasn't Japanese, that was absolutely quintessential. America Tesla were struggling, but they were hard at it. Their vision, their ambition, you could argue, was exactly the same as the Chinese. And then the people within the Chinese OEM world Lee Shufu, chairman Wang Changfu of BYD, and others. How could we have missed this so badly, it feels and seems. I know there were clean sheet. No, there weren't clean sheet paper because, as you say, they were transitioning, they were combustion, but they were way behind us. They were always iterating three or four versions of the technology before. So how come we've missed this so badly, it seems?
Speaker 2:Well, I was at the Obama administration from 2011 to 2013. And even within the halls of government, there was sort of this wait and see approach to electrification. We were pushing for it but we didn't have the power to give the industry kind of a safety net. There was sort of this will it or won't it happen perspective, and I remember watching the electric vehicle sales numbers every month like a hawk to see did they go up, did they go down? How are we doing compared to last year?
Speaker 2:And China took a very different approach. That was much more industrial policy driven, where they said look, obviously this industry can succeed. As long as we innovate and we reach scale, it will succeed. And by gum, we're going to make sure that it does succeed. And so they put an enormous number of resources behind the industry and they traded a sort of safety net for the industry, where it wasn't a question of will it or won't it happen. It was a question of how long is it going to take and how much money are we going to have to put into this to make sure that we're the ones who are driving this revolution. And I think that that's just a huge philosophical difference. And it has some funny parallels, roger, when you look at a place like Silicon Valley. Most of the people who started the biggest, most successful companies in Silicon Valley, they weren't these stories of three durchens who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and had nothing to fall back on.
Speaker 2:These were young men almost exclusively, who came from fairly wealthy or solidly upper middle class families where they had a safety net and they could go for broke and they didn't have to worry about whether they were going to invest an enormous amount of money in something and then end up in ruins. And that's sort of what you saw with the Chinese automotive companies as well. They were given a safety net. The central government said we're just going to keep at this until our industry succeeds, and so they spent a lot of money. Some people thought they were wasting a lot of money. Even I thought that the process was really quite atrociously inefficient for the first maybe five or six years of the Chinese EV effort in the late 2000s and early 2010s. But then they dialed things in and they got it right and the whole industry took off.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, wow. But can I just challenge you on something? In fact I'm sure they're your own words. Along the way in that journey in the United States during those periods you mentioned the Obama years and before and after did you not get pushback ie lobbying from Detroit to squash some of these things we know about who killed the electric car and that whole aspect of things. By the way, I'm so pleased that you gave such a high profile in your book to Chelsea Sexton. She is one of the people that I often say to people you should know about much more than me or other people who perhaps a little bit more. How can I put it in your face? Chelsea is not an in-your-face person. Her humility is extraordinary, but her achievements are grand and her influence clearly now working with Jigashar in Washington DC is profound. So yeah, that's off to you for giving Chelsea the proper respect in that story.
Speaker 2:Well, chelsea is one of the EVO Gs and I have grown to like her and respect her more and more throughout the years. She's just incredibly smart and she's been on the right side of this for a really long time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, oh, without a doubt. So let's jump around a little bit here. I had you won't know this, I don't think we've ever spoken about this before when I was at MoDec, which was a little electric startup company, kicked off in 2007. And then, of course, as you know, because we're all having the same experience around the world the banking crisis hit 2008. And by about 2010, modec, like many other companies, especially startups, were in dire straits. We were on our wrappers, we're on the way out, all of those things that aren't nice to experience.
Speaker 3:However, at that time, late 2010, without the convoluted story, I find myself having dinner with the Chinese ambassador to the UK, madame Fu Ying, and she says why don't you bring your company to China? We are embarking on a revolution for new energy vehicles. She said that's what we call our electric vehicles and we have big plans and we would love to help your company. And, of course, the popular perception at that point would be, for most people not mine, I hasten to add they're just going to copy what you're doing, they're just going to do all the things that are negative and whatever. But my sense, my intuition, was that wasn't the case at all, because, in truth, we didn't really have any IP at MoDec. The IP was all in the supply chain. What we did have were great people. We had great engineers, the guy who ran the company had had the vision to put it together in the first place, and there were many things that, yeah, they didn't have in China.
Speaker 3:You've kind of alluded to a little bit of that. So could have, would have, should have, didn't go to China at that point. But what I reflect on from time to time is that little glimpse into a window that I had at that moment in time where a senior diplomat was telling me exactly what was going on and what was going to happen. It wasn't a secret, it's not a sinister communist plot. It was the explanation of an industrial strategy. So let's fast forward to 2015. Then you published the book. Had you written and published the book before the announcement of Made in China 2025? Because that's the same year, isn't it?
Speaker 2:no-transcript. Yeah, it was written before the announcements made in China 2025. The research and the writing for the book was complete in early December 2014. Right.
Speaker 3:Right, okay, look, as I'm sure the listener has ascertained by now, I'm a big fan of the book. I'm recommending people read the book, not necessarily to just have an interest in the past. It informs the present and the future. That's my point about highlighting it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, I would make a comment on the Chinese, which is that, like so many things in this world, the story there is very complex. I mean they did pilfer an enormous amount of intellectual property from the West. I mean it was just like you could hear this giant sucking sound from Washington DC and it was just IP that was being funneled out of America into China. And when it comes to electric vehicles, in order to receive subsidies, the Chinese companies, they could purchase technology from other countries and they could purchase components from other countries, but they had to own outright one of three major systems the battery system, the inverter system or the electric motors system. The reason for that is that the Chinese were trying to indigenize all of the elements of electric vehicle production, not just supply chain, but the intellectual property. And you know, that's where we are today the Chinese now they own the whole shebang. And in the United States we're trying to sort of do something that is very similar by pulling supply chain into our orbit again, because we've lost almost all of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but here's the massive irony to all of this and I'm sure I think some of your book references is in regard to vertical integration, that principle of owning your arena. It's exactly what Henry Ford did. He kind of had to because there wasn't absolutely chain back in the day. But what happens when you do that? You have complete control on your destiny pretty much not absolutely, but pretty much. You also catch a margin that you'd otherwise give away, and it seems to me that Elon Musk has basically just taken the journey that Henry Ford went on and updated it into the Tesla playbook, because that's exactly what they've done. So you're talking about an entire country that's vertically integrated, this proposition, and there's Tesla as an individual company that's done it. Yeah, it is quite extraordinary really.
Speaker 2:And again, talking about it's also so different from what you see in the rest of the industry in the United States, because in the US what you have are traditionally you have had these big three Ford, general Motors and Chrysler and they have essentially been the best puzzle assemblers in the world. They had 30,000 pieces that came from this far-flung network of Tier 1 and Tier 2 and Tier 3 automotive suppliers, which would all bid against each other and the auto companies would try to get the best price on all of their components. They would purchase subcomponents and they would purchase subsystems from other companies, and their job at the end of the day was to design a car that made it a bunch of these pieces together and then also put the pieces together on their assembly line. But they didn't manufacture an enormous proportion of the value add in their vehicle, and Elon Musk really said no, we're not going to do that anymore. We're going to build much of the core technology for these vehicles in-house in a way that American manufacturers hadn't done in decades.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think if you read Walter Isaacson's most recent book, his book on Elon Musk, you really get a great glimpse of how he does that, why he does that, how difficult it is to do it but nonetheless, having done so, what the reward is, what the consequence is, which is pretty amazing. By the way, I'm going to ask you at the conclusion of this discussion, which we're going to wrap up in about 10 minutes, because I want to talk about battery swap and ample now. So, if you've got the book to hand again, I'd like you to read the sort of closing paragraph. But let's come right up to date. There is so much more we could talk about the book. We haven't got time in this session and this podcast. But battery swap. So, very quickly, my own experience I met Shy Gassie in 2007, when I first went to MoDec, and he went on the journey of better place.
Speaker 3:Battery swapping wasn't anything new for electric vehicles. As you know, I'm sure, back in the 1920s, big trays of lead acid batteries were switched in and out of delivery trucks in New York City and many other places. So it was just an updated version of it, and there was, of course, much more than just convenience of swapping a battery and being able to be fully charged in minutes. It was also about potentially integrating energy management and using batteries grid side as well as vehicle side Absolutely.
Speaker 2:That's a critical value proposition.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and indeed, and we found ourselves together. I don't know how many years ago was it now. You and I were together with Neo. We were in at the JAC facility and they showed us how batteries have worked. I mean, how long ago was that Just trying to?
Speaker 2:That must have been the end of 2018, the end of 2018.
Speaker 2:And I remember asking about grid integration and whether they were going to provide grid services and we had some great conversations there. We talked about second life use for their batteries, moving them into micro mobility and things like that. Once they reached a certain level of degradation and I do have to give Neo an enormous amount of credit they really saw the whole picture and they have the vision and they realized that this was going to be capital intensive, that it was going to be a long road, but at the end of the day, it was going to be an incredibly valuable system solution to electrification and I think they're executing on that very nicely, I agree, but I can't not shout out Shia Gassi and Barak Hirschkiewicz and a number of the other people there.
Speaker 3:They didn't realize the potential that they had. In other words, they didn't put it into practice. I'm not going to go through what I think they could have done better. They were pioneers and pioneers. Sometimes bad things happen to them in the end, but tell us about how sometimes, sometimes being early and being wrong are functionally indistinguishable.
Speaker 2:Right and I think that Shia was early. I don't think he was wrong. You interviewed Shia for one of the podcasts Didn't you.
Speaker 3:I watched that very first episode.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, it was excellent. It was excellent and I walked away thinking, you know, this was a guy who really had the vision and you know he was just early.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, and I could tell you about a moment in a car with Shia Gassi and Elon Musk, but I'm not going to do that. Elon Musk wasn't there, by the way. But I'll tell you about the story another time. Tell us about Ample, please, because, come on, you've been very generous with your time, but there you are now working for an amazing start-up in California. Tell us what Ample are doing and what your vision is with that.
Speaker 2:So I mean, I think everyone who listens to your show is probably familiar with the concept of battery swapping. It's a kind of EV charging. It's just different in that, rather than plugging the vehicle in and waiting you know what is generally about 30 or 45 minutes to get up to about 80% charge for an electric vehicle you have a robot that comes in and it pulls out the empty battery from your car and then it plugs in a fresh battery. And you know some of the Chinese companies that are really focused on fleet services. They can do this a just breathtaking speed. So there's a company called Alton that swaps a battery in less than a minute, which is stunning. You're never going to be able to charge an electric vehicle that fast. And so battery swapping has some really powerful value propositions.
Speaker 2:The first that we have sort of referenced a few times is grid management. It's much easier to use EV battery storage for grid management when it's always connected to the grid, and that's what you get with the battery swapping station. You get these rows of batteries that have a lot of energy in them and a lot of power available to them, and the difference between those is energy is how much energy is actually stored within the battery, and power is how much you can deliver at an instant, and so these battery swapping stations have a lot of power. They have a lot of energy. They're a very potent grid resource.
Speaker 2:You also can swap much faster than you're ever going to be able to charge an electric vehicle, and so this is particularly useful for people who might not be able to charge at home, someone who doesn't have a garage. They're useful for fleets who don't want to set up a whole charging infrastructure and they'd like to keep running their vehicle fleet in the same way that they would run a gas or diesel fleet. They just roll into the battery swapping station, it takes a few minutes to swap and then they're on their way. My company, ample, is again it's kind of the tip of the spear with respect to battery swapping in the United States, and we do something that's a little bit different from what the Chinese battery swapping companies do. We break that big battery up into a bunch of smaller pieces, and what that allows us to do is essentially stack them into different shapes and different form factors under the vehicle like Legos.
Speaker 3:Hang on a sec. What did you say? You break that. You don't literally break that battery up. How does it go from being what we all know is a great big slab to being what you're describing then? How does that happen?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's one of the weak points of battery swapping that, just like you can't fit a AA battery into a nine volt socket, you have to essentially build the entire car around whatever battery form factor you have come up with for this swapping solution. And so every Neo vehicle uses essentially the Neo battery pack. What we do is we build these smaller modular battery packs, and they are the size of the narrow, about the size of two shoeboxes, and that means that we can fit them into the geometry of pretty much any electric vehicle. And the way that we make them with that vehicle chassis is we build an adapter plate, that is, that is installed in the same cavity that your OEM battery would otherwise be installed in. And I think one of the issues that people have always pointed to is that it's going to be hard to get OEMs to adopt that technology in a house, that they're not going to go to an external supplier like Ample and use their system in an OEM's automobiles. But you know, I think the thing that has been really exciting for us is, over the past year we've had a number of announcements for major OEMs that are going to adopt Ample's technology. So Daimler Trucks we're working with them on some of their medium duty vehicle platforms for delivery vehicles, and we were we were showcasing with them at the Japan Mobility Show in November. Just a few weeks ago, we had an announcement with Stellantis, which your listeners will know yeah, yeah, it's the parent company for Chrysler and Fiat and Peugeot and a bunch of other iconic brands around the world.
Speaker 2:And the exciting thing about Ample's battery swapping system is because we use these smaller modular batteries. You can use the same battery across dozens and dozens or hundreds of different vehicle designs and platforms. You just have to design an adapter plate for those platforms and that's fairly easy to do, because almost every electric car manufacturer not every electric car manufacturer, but almost every electric car manufacturer uses some approximation of what we would call a skateboard platform, where you have something that looks kind of like a deck of cards and the cards inside are the battery cells. The box for the deck of cards is the battery pack and with unscrewing a couple dozen bolts you can drop that straight out from the bottom of the vehicle and you can install the adapter plate in the same cavity where that battery would have otherwise been. And that's what allows us to use this adapter kit and the modular batteries that are part of our swapping system in so many different kinds of vehicles.
Speaker 3:Got it. Listen, there is a lot more to it than that. I know there are lots of questions people will have for sure. So my suggestion is, if you're, now your interest is peaked, go and check out Ample, check out the website, look at some of the news releases, look at some of the videos and you'll get your head around what it is. And, of course, you can always, I'm sure, reach out to Levi on LinkedIn et cetera. But we're rushing up on an hour or we might even have been over it, but I don't want to go to. Yeah, I know. So I don't want to take too much more of your time, or indeed my listener's time, but I would like to Feel free to edit out liberally, Roger.
Speaker 3:No, I don't like editing out because I think people want to hear they don't want. We don't think there's something they missed, so I keep everything in. But can we finish back up the book and on page 274 in my copy, the final paragraph of the Great Race. Could you kind of see us out, as it were? Thank you, by the way, for your generosity of time, and I'm sure this has been fascinating, listening for people. But can we finish on that final paragraph Because I think it's so apt, like so much of what else we've been talking about.
Speaker 2:And Roger. It's been an absolute pleasure and, as I think I've told you over the years, I am a great admirer of the work that you do in this space and you are just a fantastic thought leader. And I see this with a great deal of admiration. A cheerleader for the verification of the.
Speaker 3:Thank you. I'd look dreadful dressed as a cheerleader, but I'll take that.
Speaker 2:So thank you very much.
Speaker 3:But yeah, look, please talk us out with that last paragraph.
Speaker 2:We have seen remarkable transformations over the past hundred years. Wondrous transformations, and there will be more to come. But it would be a mistake to think that America's technological dominance is somehow ensured by the innovative capacity of Silicon Valley or the excellence of our research universities or the leadership of California's government. Indeed, political dysfunction in Washington poses a serious threat to our competitive position. Nonetheless, America is still very much in the running. Today, general Motors, chrysler, tesla and even Henry Ford's motor company are all contenders. To enable their success, America will have to support new research, business models, laws and regulations, and America cannot rest, for the competitive field is fierce and the global race to build the car of the future, or shall we say the robot of tomorrow, is on.
Speaker 3:That my friend is so visionary. There you are written in 2015, and you could have written that five minutes ago. It would be just as pertinent to today. So, levi Tillerman, thank you so much for your time. You've been, I think, a fabulous guest here on the Electric and very much eclectic podcast show, so I'm looking forward to meeting up again sometime soon in the future, and good luck with everything that's happening at Amphol. Thank you.
Speaker 2:It has been an absolute pleasure, Roger, and thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to the show and make sure you follow Roger on LinkedIn, where you'll discover almost all there is to know about the spectacular Electric Vehicle Revolution.