Intel Report: The Weekly Mobility News That Matters

BY AUTOMOTIVE VENTURES | Nov 11 2024 | VIEW ONLINE ➡️

What have we learned after making 37 investments over 4 years? |

What We're Reading:

🚗 Automotive

Tesla’s stock has surged to a $1 trillion valuation. The company is virtually worth more than the next 10 biggest automakers combined. | ElectrekElon Musk — the billionaire CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, and the owner of The Boring Company, Neuralink, and X — who is worth over $260 billion and donated over $100 million to a pro-Trump super PAC — is now poised to be the incoming president’s most influential political and business adviser. Here’s what Trump's win might mean for Musk and his businesses. | TechCrunchElon Musk has experience hunting for ways to reduce costs—a daily part of the car business. “Getting cost out of things is kind of like a game of pennies—it’s like Game of Thrones, but pennies,” Musk told analysts in October. “If you’ve got 10,000 items in a car—very rough approximation—and each of them cost $4, then you have a $40,000 car. So if you want to make a $35,000 car, you got to get 50 cents on average out of the 10,000 items.” | The Wall Street Journal ($)Car buyers across America—even those with comfortable incomes—are dropping out of the new-car market. The pandemic supply shortages that drove sticker prices skyward are in the rearview mirror, but the cost of a new set of wheels continues to climb. The average price of a new car this year is $48,205, up 21% from five years ago. Monthly payments on new-car loans now average $767, up 17% from four years ago. | Bloomberg ($)Extended-range electric vehicles (EREVs) are similar to PHEVs in that they’re a sort of halfway point between gas- and battery-powered cars. An EREV is a kind of PHEV that's closer to a full electric—and drives like one. An EREV also has an electric motor and a gas engine, but the battery is usually bigger, and the gas engine doesn’t drive the wheels. Instead, the engine can recharge the battery, working as a small generator to give it extra mileage on the go. Plus, an EREV system is more efficient than a gas-powered vehicle, because the gas is powering an electric propulsion system, which wastes less energy than a gas engine. | WiredGlenn Mercer reports on the long-term declining traffic fatality rate in the USA. | Glenn MercerVolkswagen Financial Services launched a pilot new-vehicle subscription service called "VW Flex" on Oct. 30 at two Atlanta-area dealerships. Pricing starts at $599 per month for the Jetta and $799 per month for the Atlas. The monthly price includes 1,000 miles of usage, maintenance, insurance and roadside assistance. Increased mileage is an additional charge. Customers pay an initial activation fee of $495, and there’s no credit check during the application process. All payments are handled via a credit card. | Automotive News ($)As a new American president is elected, Autocar takes a look at the story of the state limousine over time. | Autocar

⚡️ Electric Vehicles (EVs)

Slowing electric-vehicle adoption is likely to accelerate even further as President-Elect Donald Trump delivers on his promise to gut plug-in friendly policies he called the “green new scam.” Automotive forecaster GlobalData Plc cut its outlook for EV market share in the US for 2030 to 28% from 33% due to Trump’s election. “The transition to electric vehicles in the US will be hindered under Trump’s administration,” Jeff Schuster, GlobalData’s vice president of automotive research, said in a note. Trump’s focus on lowering oil prices and weakening tailpipe emissions standards could reduce electric-vehicle market share by 15% to 20%, he said. | Bloomberg ($)Toyota’s bet on hybrids looks even better under Trump. The company’s Prius model was a pioneer in hybrids and it has doubled down on the strategy to roll out hybrid versions of some of its most popular cars like the RAV4 sport-utility vehicle and Camry sedan. This strategy has worked really well. Conventional and plug-in hybrids together now make up around 44% of global vehicle sales of Toyota and Lexus, its luxury brand, up from 24% four years earlier. It benefited from a surge in interest in hybrids, particularly in the U.S. as consumer interest in full electric vehicles cooled. Conventional hybrids made up 11.4% of U.S. car sales in October, up from 8.7% a year earlier, according to J.P. Morgan. That has vindicated Toyota’s strategy of slow transition to pure EVs, instead focusing on hybrids. Hybrid vehicles look like a good compromise that is here to stay—it gets the benefit of fuel savings while avoiding the range anxiety of a pure EV. They are also more profitable for the carmakers than EVs, which helps build up Toyota’s war chest, potentially to invest in more EVs for the future. Finally, under a second Trump presidency, lesser emphasis on promoting EVs from the federal government appears likely. This makes Toyota’s bet on hybrids look cannier than others that have invested more in full EVs. Tariffs would be a threat to Japanese imports, but many Toyota models are actually made in the U.S. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Amnesty International recognized Tesla and Mercedes-Benz for their “human rights diligence” in manufacturing their electric vehicles. There have been concerns about the rise in electric vehicle adoption leading to human rights issues, especially due to the increased need for some metals related to battery production, which are sometimes mined in difficult conditions. The bulk of the concerns revolve around cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). | Amnesty International

Bentley is delaying a plan to offer only fully electric vehicles by 2030 as EV sales continue to disappoint projections across the industry. It will extend the target for its “Beyond100” business strategy—now called “Beyond100+”—by five years to 2035. | Bloomberg ($)

Rivian reported a third-quarter net loss of $1.1 billion. The automaker’s gross loss per vehicle delivered was $39,130 compared with $30,648 in the year-earlier period. | Automotive News ($)

The latest Urban Science Electric Vehicle Retail Sales Report shows just how strongly Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV) sales are performing vs. Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) and Plug-In Hybrids (PHEVs). | Urban Science

✈️ Aviation & Space

Carbon dioxide emissions from private jets soared almost 50% in four years, driven by a shift in the wealthy’s post-pandemic travel habits including high numbers of flights serving big global events. The most frequent private flyers generated annual emissions that were hundreds of times greater than the average person’s total carbon footprint, according to the study of more than 25,000 aircraft between 2019 and 2023. | Financial Times ($)

A few months after ending its drone-based delivery program, Prime Air, in California, Amazon says that it’s begun making deliveries to select customers via drone in Phoenix, Arizona. Products must weigh 5 pounds or less to be eligible; Amazon says about 50,000 are available at launch. Customers can choose the drone delivery location for their address before they check out. Most can expect to receive items in an hour max, according to Amazon, delivered direct from the take-off site in Tolleson. | TechCrunch

🌡️ Climate

Donald Trump’s victory promises to shake up U.S. energy and environmental policy, with sweeping implications for oil production, offshore wind development and electric vehicle sales. The win empowers him to deliver on his campaign pledges to go after climate policies he has dubbed the “green new scam” while reorienting the federal government toward pumping more crude and building more power plants. Though some efforts would face long odds on Capitol Hill — where many of Trump’s fellow Republicans would oppose a wholesale repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy and manufacturing tax credits — Trump can use his executive authority to put other changes in motion. Oil and gas companies are set to be prime beneficiaries. | Transport TopicsPresident-elect Donald Trump spent plenty of time on the campaign trail railing against key portions of the Inflation Reduction Act, from solar and wind tax credits to electric vehicles and environmental justice initiatives. But his return to the presidency doesn’t necessarily spell the end of the landmark legislation. While Trump’s administration is unlikely to be supportive of certain climate tech startups, it will have a harder time ending the broadly popular law. | TechCrunch

✈️ Investing

Carta's "State of Pre-Seed: Q3 2024" publication is out, and it's full of valuable data for VCs.The information below lines up with our typical investments in the Y Combinator SAFE document: almost all of our deals have valuation caps. | Carta

🚘 Car of the Week

Our Automotive Ventures "Cars of the Week": a 2006 Koenigsegg CCXR Prototype. | Bonhams Cars

Have a great week,Steve Greenfield

Forwarded this email and not yet a subscriber?

Subscribe Now

Notable & New

📢

Steve wrote a guest article on the new AutoIndustry.ai site for how AI will shape the next generation of automotive dealerships. | AutoIndustry.ai

📢

As an investor, you're not supposed to pick favorites. But we have to say that this new homepage for our portfolio company Auriga Space ROCKS! | Auriga Space

🎤

On this week's "Future of Automotive" segment on CBT News: we explore how you’re about to start hearing a lot more about a new category of electric vehicle, the Extended Range Electric Vehicle, or EREV. | CBT News ($)

Enjoying this newsletter? Please share with others!

NAVIcon is back November 20th/21st in Scottsdale, AZ: LINK

Companies to Watch

🌟 Smartville has created a shared platform for capturing and utilizing battery data and developing full end-to-end solutions for scalable EV battery assessment, qualification, logistics, and reuse. | Smartville.io

Upcoming Industry Events