On Corporate Evolution

Once upon a time, there was an automobile industry that was so hung up on playing PR games trying maintain its image as Numero Uno, that it missed about a hundred signs that it was having its lunch money pilfered either by the American company across town, or by foreign (ie: Japanese) car makers.

Enter Lee Iacocca, Carroll Shelby, and the Ghost Of Harley Earl.

Those companies had become ossified, mostly because top-down plutocrats couldn't figure out how to listen to the guys on the line - the guys who were actually doing the work.

Things have and haven't changed a bit.

A 120-Year-Old Company Is Leaving Tesla in the Dust

Tesla had me convinced, for a while, that it was a cool company.

It made cars that performed animatronic holiday shows using their lights and power-operated doors. It came up with dog mode (a climate control system that stays running for dogs in a parked car), a GPS-linked air suspension that remembers where the speed bumps are and raises the car automatically, and “fart mode” (where the car makes fart sounds).

And, fundamentally, its cars had no competition. If you wanted an electric car that could go more than 250 miles between charges, Tesla was your only choice for the better part of a decade. The company’s C.E.O., Elon Musk, came across as goofy and eccentric: You could build great cars and name each model such that the lineup spells “SEXY.”

Or you would, if not for the party-killers over at boring old Ford. Ford thwarted Mr. Musk’s “SEXY” gambit by preventing Tesla from naming its small sedan the Model E, since that sounds a bit too much like a certain famous Ford, the Model T. So Mr. Musk went with Model 3, which either ruins the joke or elevates it, depending on how much you venerate Tesla and Elon Musk. I count myself as a former admirer of Mr. Musk and Tesla, and in fact put a deposit on a Model 3 after my first drive of one.

But the more I dealt with Tesla as a reporter — this was before Mr. Musk fired all the P.R. people who worked there — the more skeptical I became. Any time I spoke to anyone at Tesla, there was a sense that they were terrified to say the wrong thing, or anything at all. I wanted to know the horsepower of the Model 3 I was driving, and the result was like one of those oblique Mafia conversations where nothing’s stated explicitly, in case the Feds are listening. I ended up saying, “Well, I read that this car has 271 horsepower,” and the Tesla person replied, “I wouldn’t disagree with that.” This is not how healthy, functional companies answer simple factual questions.

That was back in 2017. In the years since, Tesla’s become even crankier, while its competition has loosened up. Public perception hasn’t yet caught up with the reality of the situation. If you want to work for a flexible, modern company, you don’t apply to Tesla. You apply to 120-year-old Ford.

Tesla’s veneer of irreverence conceals an inflexible core, an old-fashioned corporate autocracy. Consider Tesla’s remote work policy, or lack thereof. Last year, Mr. Musk issued a decree that Tesla employees log 40 hours per week in an office — and not a home office — if they expected to keep their jobs. On Indeed.com, the question, “Can you work remotely at Tesla?” includes answers like, “No,” and “Absolutely not, they won’t let it happen under any circumstances,” and “No, Tesla will work you until you lose everything.”

But on the other hand, the cars make fart noises. What a zany and carefree company!

Ford’s work-from-home rules for white-collar employees, meanwhile, sound straight out of Silicon Valley, in that the official corporate policy is that there is no official corporate policy — it’s up to the leaders of individual units to require in-person collaboration, or not, as situations dictate. There are new “collaboration centers” in lieu of cubicle farms, complete with food service and concierges. That’s not the reality of daily work life for every person at Ford — you can’t exactly bolt together an F-150 from home — but it’s an attempt to provide some flexibility for as many people as possible.

Ford also tends to make good on its promises, an area that’s become increasingly fraught for Tesla. Ford said it would offer a hands-free driver assist system, and now it does, with BlueCruise; you can take your hands off the steering wheel when it is engaged on premapped sections of highway. Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system is not hands-free in any situation, despite its name, and Tesla charges customers $15,000 for the feature on the promise that someday it will make the huge leap to full autonomous driving.

If you want to pay $15,000 for a feature that’s currently subject to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recall whose filing is titled “Full Self-Driving Software May Cause Crash,” don’t let me stop you, but a Tesla engineer also recently testified that a company video purporting to show the system in flawless action was faked. This makes sense, given all the other very real videos of Full Self-Driving doing things like steering into oncoming traffic or braking to a complete stop on a busy street for no reason. Tesla’s own website warns, “The currently enabled features require a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment.” So, full self-driving, except for that.

Tesla’s long-promised new vehicles, like the Cybertruck and a new version of its Roadster, also keep getting delayed. The Cybertruck was unveiled in 2019, and on Tesla’s most recent earnings call Mr. Musk admitted that it won’t be in production this year, which is becoming an annual refrain. Sure, Ford sold only 15,617 electric F-150 Lightning pickups in 2022, but that beats the Cybertruck’s sales by, let’s see, 15,617. Besides stealing Tesla’s market share on trucks, Ford’s stealing its corporate impishness, too — when the electric Mustang Mach-E was unveiled, Ford demonstrated its tailgating possibilities by filling its drainable front trunk (or “frunk”) with shrimp. “Frunk shrimp” became a meme, which surely tormented the emperor of try-hard social media posting, Elon Musk.

Speaking of which: Twitter. I will hazard the opinion that Mr. Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter has not exactly burnished Tesla’s reputation. Besides showcasing the questionable decision-making inherent in paying that much for Twitter, Mr. Musk’s heightened profile on the platform hasn’t really done him any favors. For instance, when the bulk of your car company’s sales are in blue states, is it helpful to tweet, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci”? Moreover, you’d think that the self-appointed class clown of corporate America would at least strive for a joke that eschews the hacky “my pronouns are/I identify as” construction. Maybe just go with “Fauci makes me grouchy”? Elon, let’s workshop this next time.

Maybe predictability isn’t trendy, but if you buy a new car you’d probably like to think that its manufacturer won’t cut the price by $13,000 the next week, thus destroying your car’s resale value. And you might hope that features you pay for work on the day you pay for them, and not at some unspecified future date. Maybe you want a car from a company whose C.E.O. isn’t indelibly associated with the product.

I just bought a Jeep and I have no idea who the C.E.O. is there. That’s cool with me.

BTW - when was the last time you saw a 4-door sedan stomp a tricked out Corvette in a drag race?

This is not your grandma's Insight

EV Is Booming

1. Demand for electric vehicles is way out ahead of Supply
2. In spite of propaganda to the contrary, there're plenty of the mineral resources needed to create batteries, etc
3. The Inflation Reduction Act requires domestic production of some of the EV stuff
4. Wyoming is behaving about as stupidly as we'd expect a Dirty Fuels plutocracy to behave (The Hill - Wyoming Proposes Ban On EVs By 2035)

Electric Vehicles Keep Defying Almost Everyone’s Predictions

You’re reading the David Wallace-Wells newsletter, for Times subscribers only. The best-selling science writer and essayist explores climate change, technology, the future of the planet and how we live on it. Get it in your inbox.
It is striking that in the same year that Tesla’s stock price dropped by about two-thirds, destroying more than $700 billion in market value, the global market for electric vehicles — which for so long the company seemed almost to embody — actually boomed.

Boom may not even adequately communicate what happened. Around the world, E.V. sales were projected to have grown 60 percent in 2022, according to a BloombergNEF report prepared ahead of the 2022 U.N. climate conference COP27, bringing total sales over 10 million. There are now almost 30 million electric vehicles on the road in total, up from just 10 million at the end of 2020. E.V. market share has also tripled since 2020.

The pandemic years can feel a bit like a vacuum, but there are almost three times as many E.V.s on the world’s roads now as there were when Covid vaccines were first approved, and what looked not that long ago like a climate pipe dream is now undeniably underway: a genuine transition away from fossil-fueled transportation. This week, the Biden administration released a blueprint toward a net zero transportation sector by 2050. It’s an ambitious goal, especially for such a car-intoxicated culture as ours. But it’s also one that, thanks to trends elsewhere in the world, is beginning to seem more and more plausible, at least on the E.V. front.

In Norway, electric vehicles now represent four out of every five new cars sold; the figure was just one in five as recently as 2016. In Germany, more than 55 percent of new cars registered in December were electric or hybrid. In China, where more electric vehicles are sold than everywhere else in the world combined, the rise is perhaps even more dramatic: from 3.5 percent of the market at the beginning of 2020 to 20.3 percent at the beginning of 2022. And growing, of course: Nearly twice as many electric vehicles were sold last year in China as in the year before. The country also exported $3.2 billion worth of E.V.s last November alone, more than double the exports of the previous November. Its largest single manufacturer, BYD, has surpassed Tesla for global market share — so perhaps it should not be so surprising that Tesla’s stock is dimming while the global outlook is so sunny.

This is not just eye-popping growth; it is also dramatically faster than most analysts were projecting just a few years ago. In 2020, the International Energy Agency projected that the global share of electric vehicle sales would not top 10 percent before 2030. It appears we’ve already crossed that bar eight years early, and BloombergNEF now projects that the market share of E.V.s will approach 40 percent by the end of the decade. (The I.E.A. is less bullish but has still roughly doubled its 2030 projection in just two years.) The underlying production capacity is perhaps even more encouraging. In the United States, investments in battery manufacturing reached a record $73 billion last year — three times as much as the previous record, set the year before. Globally, battery manufacturing capacity grew almost 40 percent last year, and is projected to grow fivefold by just 2025. By that year, lithium mining is expected to be triple what it was in 2021.

We’ve seen this phenomenon before, with many other areas of the green transition experiencing similarly shocking exponential or quasi-exponential growth: renewable energy investments in the United States quadrupling in a decade, global investments in clean tech growing more than 30-fold over the same period, a solar supply chain already big enough to facilitate a total transition. It’s enough to make many optimistic observers giddy with anticipation of what’s to come.

What is to come?

It is tempting to believe that designing a future is as simple as drawing the right trajectory on a whiteboard. But as with everything else when it comes to climate, the challenge is bigger than that — indeed, the fact that trend lines are beginning to point in the right direction can be a kind of false comfort, since technologies like these don’t just descend from the cloud onto the world’s phones. And the scientist Vaclav Smil’s gloomy comparisons to previous energy transitions aside, the world hasn’t undertaken a breakneck allover revolution like this ever before in its history. Do the familiar, S-shaped learning curves of technological adaptation mean that it should be very easy, and indeed remunerative, for the world to get on track to limit warming below two degrees Celsius, or even 1.5 degrees, as a much talked about paper produced by Oxford’s Institute for New Economic Thinking has suggested? Or, as the scholar Jessica Jewell has argued in the journal Nature Energy and elsewhere, do the limitations of practical obstacles and political economy mean that, even assuming those encouraging learning curves, much more would have to be done to ensure technological adoption at that speed?

Here the E.V. revolution is an illuminating case study. To stabilize global temperatures, we have to get emissions basically all the way down to zero, not just reduce them — an interesting November paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters suggests it might be better to aim for “approximately” net zero emissions, since it may be the case that global temperatures could stabilize even if emissions aren’t entirely eliminated. To do that, we need to stop burning fossil fuels in cars, not just supplement the existing fleet with slightly more green alternatives. A rapid growth in market share isn’t itself sufficient, in other words, because — like carbon itself, which hangs in the air for centuries at least — dirty cars stay on the road for a very long time, emitting all the while.

Economists call this a problem of stocks rather than flows. In this case, while the “flows” are indeed impressive, the “stock” of E.V.s on the road is probably only 2 percent of the global fleet, which still isn’t close to 100 percent at all.

Rapid growth also opens up a new landscape of challenges. We used to worry whether there would be sufficient demand for electric vehicles, particularly given their cost and range limitations. But demand already outstrips supply, which, in addition to driving up the cost of E.V.s and creating manufacturing and delivery delays, has given rise to anxiety over the next roadblock: the empire of mineral extraction, refinement and production that has to be built to meet that. That obstacle may be in some ways smaller than it appears, as Hannah Ritchie, among others, has emphasized: We are not yet mining enough lithium to meet demand, but it’s not exactly a scarce resource, and even Ritchie’s relatively conservative estimates suggest there is more than enough for a battery vehicle revolution.

Those taking a broader view of the ecological costs of this project, like the activist Thea Riofrancos, worry over a different set of unresolved questions: Is it possible to design a system for extracting and producing these materials in anything close to a responsible way? One possible approach, flagged by the Volts newsletter writer David Roberts, among others: actually recycling batteries, treating lithium as a “renewable” rather than endlessly extracted resource.

Behind that challenge lies another: Will production of electric vehicles be interrupted by potential deglobalization in green industries or by America’s Inflation Reduction Act, which requires that a portion of E.V. batteries’ parts be sourced or manufactured domestically or by certain trading partners to qualify for tax credits? At the moment, China produces about 75 percent of all E.V. battery cells, manufactures roughly the same share of those cell components and does more refining of many of the biggest raw inputs than the rest of the world combined.

There are also problems of what the civil engineer Emily Grubert has memorably called the “mid-transition”: “this period in between kind of a stable fossil fuel dominated energy system and a future stable, clean energy dominated system.” It is easy enough to imagine the other side of any transition, particularly when so many forces are moving in the right direction. But you have to get to that other side, and that is not just a matter of building out the new system but also, crucially, of maintaining some of the old one too, and in proper balance.

If E.V.s and gas cars share the roads for a decade or two, how do you ensure or design the right mix of charging stations and gas pumps, and how do you map their locations? At what point do gas stations become unprofitable, and what happens then? These may seem like relatively technical questions, but the problems of the mid-transition extend to the matter of employment structures and pensions, the need for skilled labor to manage site cleanup and safety and the decline of funding from gas taxes for maintenance and infrastructure as gas consumption declines (if not all that rapidly to zero).

The vast majority of electric vehicles are now sold in the world’s richer economies, and mid-transition challenges like building out new charging infrastructure are potentially much larger in lower income countries. But there, at least for now, the electric vehicle revolution is taking a very different shape — often with two or three wheels rather than four. Globally, there are 10 times as many electric scooters, mopeds and motorcycles on the road as true electric cars, accounting already for almost half of all sales of those vehicles and responsible already for eliminating more carbon emissions than all the world’s four-wheel E.V.s. It’s been something of a secret revolution here, too: In 2020, Americans bought twice as many e-bikes as they did E.V.s. As with everything else on climate, it’s not one story unfolding but many, and all at once.

Motor Trend - Project X

And the gearheads and gadget freaks shall lead them to the promised land.

Today's Green Stuff

On my best day, I could get it down to about 5 seconds in my '56 Chevy.

327 bored out to about 335. Holley 650 double-pumper on top of an Edlebrock highrise manifold, 2.02 Fuely heads, custom pipes, 4-speed trans out of a 'Vette, Mr Gasket vertical gate shifter, 410 rear end with Positrac and traction bars.

I loved that car, and I would've traded it for this EV Hummer in a heartbeat.

It's a fuckin' Hummer, FFS

Straight From The Horse's Mouth

James Fallows is no Libtard.

One thing this means is that we could reduce our Oil Consumption dramatically, which means we could reduce political tensions in the world dramatically.

The 8.2 million barrels of oil (per day) we're currently burning as gasoline in light duty autos becomes 2.9 million.  Please don't try to tell me we wouldn't benefit greatly from that kind of change in the status quo.

And please don't try to tell me there's nobody working overtime to keep that kind of change from happening.