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I think Pat G was a good leader with the wrong strategy who believed he could will Intel back to greatness. Lip-Bu Tan is a little better in some ways, but at the end of the day, if your strategy is wrong you can't win.
I think IDM is a broken strategy at this point and I honestly can't...
I don't think Intel will ever reclaim it's crown. If they play their cards right, they can be a profitable fabless company. I like Lip-Bu Tan much better than PG... but he's still got the wrong strategy trying to somehow make Intel a competitor to TSMC.
I would say if you are picking a semi company that you would expect to have a moat in robotics applications... I would pick STMicroelectronics. They are probably the leader in the kinds of microcontrollers that are used in robotics and other embedded systems. However they are not really a...
Mostly agree on this point. Stamping/body shop tooling is very specific to the model being made. General assembly is also pretty specific to the model being made.
Battery/drivetrain you can support a few different models, and paint is somewhat flexible.
You can have different variants of a...
Lithium anode batteries have the highest theoretical working voltages (and energy density).
Solid state batteries are example of lithium anode. This is the main attraction of solid state - it's a pathway towards lithium anode. Solid state in my view is completely proven from a materials...
As an additional datapoint on cycle life, the benchmark for LFP batteries for EV applications with a graphite anode is 10,000 cycles. I don't believe commercial silicon anode batteries are anywhere near this level yet. There have been R&D claims of higher cycle life silicon anode batteries...
That’s the biggest challenge right now, silicon anode expands and contracts during charge/discharge and that causes the material to deteriorate faster than graphite. Most of the work being done on silicon anode is around improving cycle life.
To me silicon anode is a stopgap to lithium anode...
2 years ago I predicted a 10x improvement and battery cost/performance at the pack level over the next 10 years. Very few people believed me then but now we have already seen a 2x performance improvement in the last 2 years... so another 5x to go in the next 8 years. We are ahead of schedule...
Batteries are very very complex to manufacture. Gasoline is actually really simple to make, it's a distillation process. The make gasoline out of stolen crude oil in the slums of India and Africa and sell it on the side of the road... it's not great for your engine but it actually does work...
You are wrong on #4.
Believe it or not, there is a lot of room to reduce the amount of Aluminum and Copper in the current collector. The thickness of these materials is not driven by ohms law, it's driven by the manufacturing process - you need a thick enough material to run through a...
There are a lot of newcomers in the China market, many entering from the electronics industry.
In some ways the disruption in the EV industry has parallels to how the ICE industry disrupted the Horse and wagon industry. The incumbent wagon makers looked at automobiles as essentially wagons...
These companies were a little slower, but they are either developing their own EV platforms or switching to CATL/BYD platforms for battery/drive train. See SAIC as an example.
https://cnevpost.com/2025/01/10/saic-battery-swap-models-catl-solution/
Early on when companies were skeptical or did...
This was the way a lot of companies did things 5-10 years ago, but I assure you that the leading Chinese EV companies today have dedicated EV platforms and are not repurposing their ICE platforms. There is not a lot of cost sharing between leading EV platforms and ICE platforms anymore.
Look...
The battery, because of it's mass, cannot just be put anywhere, it needs to be at the bottom of the vehicle. Otherwise the vehicle dynamics would suffer greatly.
The electric powertrain cannot be stuffed anywhere either, the electric powertrain is literally just electric motors + software...
I have worked extensively in the battery/EV industry, so in this topic I am speaking from direct experiance.
The reason that legacy auto makers are failing in EV is because it goes against their existing business model and supply chains. An ICE factory cannot just be retooled to make EVs, with...
I would say China's strategy in the automotive industry paid off. China would not have been able to develop (and subsequently dominate) it's EV industry if it hadn't developed the workforce in manufacturing ICE cars first. When a ICE car factory, which is probably a JV with a US company and...
China is not Marxist or communist and hasn't been for a very long time. It's sort of a hybrid system, which is mostly capitalistic with some elements of fascism mixed in. Fascism itself has elements of socialism ingrained with it as well. But modern China is hardly more socialist than the...
I am not a big believer in big brain do everything models. I think the only purpose of very large models will be for distillation of smaller models that do the thing you actually want them to do at the edge.
