let's bring in scott, painter, founder and Ceo
of autonomy scott. Can you just tell us a
little bit more about, you know, President biden's
plan here? I can't imagine that it is the
total solution to this issue. But what percentage of
the solution, you know, would it be if
it becomes a reality? You know, we're,
we're actually going through a pretty fundamental shift in terms
of what people drive. This shift to electric is
going to be a very, very big thing.
And in terms of the real barriers to transform transforming
into electric. Clearly what we make is going to
be step one. You can't buy what isn't being
made. There are 38 different car makers that have
said that they're going all in on electric and that
they are going to be coming to market in the
next 18 months with products. So you've got a
lot of choices as a consumer that are going to
be coming to market. The second biggest issue is
affordability. Um, there are a lot of powerful
forces at work that make affordability a challenge. It's
not just scarcity, inflation, interest rates, gas
prices, but the cost of an electric car is
usually 20-40% more. Most of what you see in
terms of range anxiety and charging infrastructure are mostly fear
based. You know, I don't know how necessary
a lot of these things are. The market does
tend to behave pretty predictably, charging infrastructure tends to
follow electric vehicle registrations and I don't know that this
is a chicken or the egg problem, meaning that
if we make electric cars, we're not gonna have
enough places to charge them. You've currently got 120,000
public charging charging stations in the us, 30,000 of
those alone are provided by one company, Tesla.
So this would really five x the total supply.
It's a great goal. I don't think that there's
anything that can go wrong with, you know,
incentivizing more charging infrastructure. I really think the idea
of standardization is a big deal. Standardization is certainly
make it much better for everybody to be able to
get a charge when they need one. To that
point. I want to take, I want our
viewers to take a look at this map right here
that we have, there are E V charging stations
across the country in the US, you mentioned 100
and 20,000, but they're not all created equal.
I mean some charge only certain cars take different amount
of times to charge that you gotta factor in.
Can you break down this infrastructure and what the state
of the E V charging infrastructure really truly looks like
in the US to prepare for this rapid shift that
we are going to see and already are seeing in
the E V space? Well, it's important to
recognize there are three levels of uh, E V
charging, you got level one, level two and
level three, level one is really plugging your car
with this existing converter into a 1 10 outlet that
gets you about 25 to 30 miles of charge per
night. The average evey driver is only driving 25
miles. So 80% of all E. V.
Drivers today are using level one, charging level two
charging which gives you about 65 to 70 miles over
the course of an evening is going to go ahead
and see um you're gonna see that in shopping malls
, workplaces. Level two charging is a lot less
expensive to get installed. It requires a 240 volt
outlet and it's only about 102$100 of electricians time
. So we'll see a lot more level two investment
being made on a private basis and then level three
which is really the dc fast charging where you're going
to get up to 100 and 50 to 300 miles
of charge in 30 to 45 minutes and even faster
as battery technology and charging technology improves. I think
that the level three charging is what you're talking about
, where the investment is going to be made in
the bulk of what President biden is talking about even
level three charging though, it's not the same experience
that people are used to in terms of going to
the gas station and even on the slowest gaps five
minutes, you've got your gas tank filled, you're
still looking at an hour to get 100 and 50
you know mile range up to like 300 mile range
, How big of an issue do you think that's
going to be in terms of this consumer adopting to
that mentality When the electric transformation began nearly 10 years
ago? The fear was that we were all going
to have this problem where the roads were going to
be littered with cars that are running out of juice
and that's just not the case. I think that
today, what we see is that electric car drivers
understand their range issues. They understand how far they
can go and we do not see a lot of
drivers that are stranded. So this is really a
fear, not a reality. It's not really a
big barrier to adopting an electric, I will say
. And I don't want to exacerbate fear, but
there was this recent article in The Wall Street Journal
Reporter took a four day road trip I think from
the northeast to texas and spent 18 hours waiting for
her vehicle to charge. Over the course of this
trip. I imagine that must have been at the
level one charging stations more than anything. Um,
this is an anecdotal story doesn't kind of, you
know, signal a bigger picture here, but it
is a story that I imagine a lot of people
are going to read and see and say maybe maybe
that's something that I'm not ready for. Maybe that
does point to a bigger issue with this E.
V infrastructure? What are your thoughts in terms of
a lot of these, you know, vehicles coming
on the road that have ranges of 300 something miles
of range, but that's not enough to take a
full on road trip. And so they're not building
these vehicles to have these long ranges and that could
lead to further hesitancy in the E V space.
Well, I think it's really important to recognize that
two things are occurring one, the battery technology and
the EV technology is improving on a very, very
quick pace. But currently you've got 300 million vehicles
on American roads and only about two or three million
of them are electric. So we've got a long
way to go in terms of electric adoption. There
may not be today a really strong use case for
a really long road trip in an electric car.
That is not necessarily the case with Tesla and some
of these others. But I think that you're starting
to see batteries that are coming out and being announced
, 500 mile batteries, you're gonna start to see
1000 mile batteries. All of that is going to
improve over time. But again, it's going to
follow the adoption curve where consumers are saying, I
want to lean in and drive an electric car,
but clearly we have hit a tipping point in terms
of what manufacturers, consumers are saying. We've got
wait lists across the industry that are in the millions
of customers today. That's a really unique sort of
attribute of the electric vehicle market and that's part of
the reason for us even doing the story today because
what we were talking about behind the scenes was that
others from the president's, you know, idea here
, we don't know if it will actually become a
reality. What else is being done to in fewer
to ensure that the infrastructure picture is matching the demand
that we are seeing because if not we have a
major problem on our hands come a year or two
from now, potentially. Can you just talk about
, am I missing something? Is there something happening
in the private sector in terms of a lot of
these companies building up their own infrastructure kind of like
what a Tesla has done? Well, I was
just gonna say the free market is a pretty efficient
system and electric cars need a place to charge.
If you look at vehicle registrations, electric vehicle registrations
and charging infrastructure are a good match today. If
you live in California, you can charge your car
with a DC fast charge within 10 miles of your
home. That is unique to California because vehicle registrations
in California are literally 10 times higher than anywhere else
in the country. However, new pockets are emerging
, whether you're talking about south florida or you're looking
in denver, austin, texas, Washington state Oregon
or you know, Arizona, all of these hot
spots are starting to see infrastructure also follow. So
I would say again, it's not a chicken or
the egg problem. But as customers buy electric cars
, infrastructure will emerge, scott. Really appreciate your
time and your insight. Thanks to your point,
there is some fear here. Maybe it's a little
bit overblown and we have to wait for things to
kind of catch up as those those cars roll out
on the production line scott really again appreciate it,
scott painter, founder and ceo of Autonomy dot com --> .