Nadim Maluf of Qnovo

Overview

JOHN: Today in The Garage, we talk with Qnovo about software-defined batteries. Let’s go.

JOHN: Welcome to The Garage. I’m John Heinlein, Chief Marketing Officer with Sonatus. Today in The Garage, we’re going to talk about software-defined batteries, battery management systems, and many other exciting topics that are very important for EVs. Our guest today is Nadim Maluf. Nadim is CEO and co-founder of Qnovo. Nadim, welcome to The Garage.

NADIM: John, and Sonatus, thank you for having me today.

Meet Nadim Maluf

JOHN: So we like to begin by getting to know our guests. Tell us a little about you and your background.

NADIM: I’m trained as an engineer. I went to school at Cal Tech and then got my PhD at Stanford many moons back.

JOHN: We have that in common.

NADIM: And as a graduate of science, I wanted to be a professor for many years. And tried that track for a few years and realized that was not my cup of tea. And so I moved on to industry. And, of course, Silicon Valley is such a great extension of Stanford. And sort of… Initially, I was in automotive. My first job ever in the 90s was the TPMS, the Tire Pressure Monitoring System back in the 90s when nobody cared about that. And we would go to the customers and say, please buy my system. They’d say, what’s wrong with my mechanical gauge? So for all of us, now in automotive today who are questioning adoption, we’ve had a lot of scars on our back from those days. And I swore to never get back into automotive again. So I went… sort of out of automotive, into telecom, fiber optic telecom, and kind of did a lot of work in there. And then founded Qnovo in 2010.

JOHN: That’s great. That’s a fantastic background. I mean, I had a science background. I briefly toyed with being a professor, had some job offers to be a professor, but I, like you, went into the private sector and I’ve enjoyed it. But it’s a wonderful background, I think, to have a science background. We also like to hear some fun fact about our guests. Tell us some fun fact about you.

Arthur Eddington and the Eddington numbers

NADIM: So my team knows I’m a very avid cyclist, and I’m going to digress for a moment and go back about 100 years ago to a very famous scientist by the name of Arthur Eddington, Sir Arthur Eddington, an Englishman. And his claim to fame, in 1919 was to demonstrate experimentally that Einstein’s relativity was correct. He went to an island in the Atlantic and showed that actually the starlight bent around the eclipse from the sun from the mass. Very fascinating. Especially in World War I. But if you Google Arthur Eddington, and especially if you look for Arthur Eddington’s Eddington number, you’ll get two numbers. One of them is the number of protons in the world, which we’re not going to go down today, down that path.

But the second one actually is he was a very avid cyclist, and that number was specifically around the number of rides that you’ve done that equaled the number of miles. So for example, let’s say your Eddington number is ten. That means you’ve done ten rides that were at least ten miles long.

JOHN: Okay.

NADIM: 20 of course, that means 20 rides at 20 miles long. So his number was 68. Mine is like 65. So I’m very happy that I’m in that category.

JOHN: And so that means 65 rides that are 65 miles long or longer.

NADIM: Indeed.

JOHN: So it’s exponential.

NADIM: Very exponential, of course, if you like to watch the Tour de France guys, those guys are 100 plus.

JOHN: They do hundreds of miles before breakfast on most days.

NADIM: Indeed.

JOHN: Incredible. Thank you so much. I always like to say some fun fact to match our guest. I used to do triathlons a lot. I’ve done a lot of running races and stuff, but I was really proud for a while, I did triathlons. I did a number of Olympic distance triathlons, which is a kind of a quarter Ironman, approximately, not exactly. And one time I did a half Ironman triathlon, which I’m very proud of. It’s probably my single biggest athletic achievement. And when I finished it, I said to my wife, wow, that was much harder than I thought. She says, yeah, I didn’t want to tell you because my wife has done an actual Ironman. She says, it’s much harder, I didn’t want to tell you.

NADIM: A lot of respect for athletes, especially triathletes.

About Qnovo

JOHN: Well, anyway, thank you for sharing that fact. Now tell us about your company, Qnovo, what do you do and what’s the technology you provide?

NADIM: Indeed. So I’ll start with the name first, Qnovo. So “q” of course, is the universal symbol of charge. Novo is Latin for new. So you can begin to gather the pieces, sort of the “new charge.” And in 2010, if you go back in time a little bit, we all knew that batteries were going to be in the future. EVs were certainly going to be in the future, but was it going to be in my lifetime or somebody else’s lifetime? No one was really sure. But we realized a couple of facts at the time. One was that batteries are difficult to build, and China was going to be a dominant player in the manufacturing of batteries, which they are today. Indeed. And so we wanted to sort of see, can we do something different that wouldn’t put us on a collision course with the Chinese? And one of the inspiration points was the smartphones, the iPhone, and the early Android phones. They were taking pictures that were absolutely stellar.

JOHN: Right.

NADIM: And being a photographer myself, you wonder, wait a second, what is it that we’re doing with those 50 cent plastic lenses that a $1,000 Nikon lens couldn’t do? Well, were we violating the laws of physics? And the answer was no, we’re not. What we did, we shifted the burden from manufacturing to computation. Computation is so cheap today that we can do so many things and correct for the misses that were done in manufacturing. So one, of course, that meant performance improvement. But the second, if we can shift the burden from manufacturing to computation, I can lower the cost of my manufacturing at the same time.

So fast forward ten years and that’s exactly what we’re doing today. Ten years ago, 15 years ago, it was blasphemous that, you’re going to do what to batteries? You’re going to make them better with software? When we went and talked to the electrochemists and the battery gurus, they’re like, just go away. Today it’s a very different story. So we’re very happy with the progression.

JOHN: Yeah, it’s so interesting. So many interesting things you’ve shared there. One is, I think hardware-software co-design, where you know, you solve the right problems in the right place. You solve the hardware problems at hardware, but you realize that software’s role– and that they have a role working together– is such a fundamental reason for many of the innovations we have today, whether it’s phones or cars, or you can, you know, many things, cameras. So I think that’s a very interesting point.

The other thing you talked about was, you know, the explosion in battery advancements. I mean, it was only I’m thinking that was probably ten years ago, I started driving an EV. I think it’s probably ten years. Yeah. Ten years. And when I first thought about adopting it, I was really hesitant. And, you know, the range was much less and whatever. But the progress even over the past ten years has been incredible. The range, the quality, the cost, has been unbelievable. And so it’s been a really remarkable thing to watch first hand as a customer and of course, in the industry.

What is BMS?

So one of the things that Qnovo does is work around BMS. And I’m not minimizing what you do, but perhaps it would be helpful for our guests who are a little bit less familiar with this to give some context about what does BMS mean and why is it so important to EVs?

NADIM: So BMS stands for Battery Management Systems, which is a very broad term. It’s almost like going back to the 80s and saying, I work on computer software. So in the 80s, sure, it meant MS-DOS, maybe Windows 3.1. Sure. I get it. Today, you say I work on PC software and people scratch their head and say, what do you really mean, right? And so BMS is going down that same progression. Over the last ten years, BMS really meant a very basic layer of intelligence in the system, in the vehicle, on the ECU that did some very basic controls. Watching the voltages, watching the currents, temperatures, some communication, but very primitive. In many ways akin to the BIOS on your PC.

JOHN: Sure.

NADIM: Important. But every major OEM did it internally. They had their own peculiar way of controlling. And so was very tight. Now you start looking at the next generation of intelligence around the BMS. It’s now thinking about, hey, I am now MS Office. I am Adobe. All those layers that created so much productivity in a PC. Is there an equivalent version of that on the battery or the EV side? And the answer is absolutely yes. And that’s what we do.

Next-level fast charging

So things for example that you unleash the performance. Fast charging. I mean today we routinely charge a vehicle in about 16, 17, 18 minutes, give or take, without damaging a battery. That’s the trick.

JOHN: You can do that with your technology?

NADIM: We can do with that.

JOHN: Well that’s incredible because typically when we think about charging, even a supercharger in 30, 40 minutes, and in a home charger in, you know, overnight.

NADIM: Indeed. And unlike the superchargers or perhaps those charging stations, you have no limitations. You can go charge on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, every day of the week. Some of those supercharging stations, you only get to charge perhaps once in a while because you degrade the battery. So we don’t have that limitation with our intelligence.

The next big layer that also we’re very good at is the predictive safety. One of the facts that perhaps is not well known is that today in China, which is the biggest EV market today on the planet.

JOHN: EV as in for the cars and also EV batteries as well. Both.

NADIM: Indeed. Indeed. But so EVs… Because EVs are very visible on the road.

JOHN: Right.

NADIM: There are on average eight daily fires on the road in China.

JOHN: That’s an incredible stat.

NADIM: Imagine that in this country. I mean NHTSA would be all over you.

JOHN: Right.

Predictive safety for batteries

NADIM: And so that means safety has to change. And that’s where we play a big role. Predictive safety. In other words, if you look at the recalls that have happened in the last few years, can we get to the point where we can single out the 1 or 2 bad batteries in that whole lot of vehicles, instead of recalling for billions of dollars, single out the 1 or 2 bad batteries and take them out of circulation and make it a $20,000 recall or perhaps a maintenance call as opposed to a big recall. And that’s what we do.

JOHN: Okay, so that’s incredible. So really, you’re saying taking BMS from what was perhaps generation one, relatively rudimentary monitoring basic things to a much more advanced capability of doing a range of things like better performance, better charging capabilities, better safety. That’s incredible.

Improving cost of EV batteries

NADIM: Absolutely. But this is just the beginning. There’s so much more that can be done. I mean, we push the envelope a bit more. Batteries are expensive today. EVs… The problem with EVs, is not so much performance. It’s really cost. Affordability.

JOHN: And batteries are the single biggest cost of the EV.

NADIM: Exactly. So what if we can find ways to open up the manufacturing envelope of batteries? Allow perhaps a bit more defects in the batteries, but correct for them in the software. And then bring down the cost by ten, 20, 30%? What if we actually went and bought more batteries out of China instead of being sourced exclusively from Korea and Japan, where they have high-quality batteries, and reduced that cost by 50%? The affordability equation is vastly different at that point in time, and OEMs will make money today than not making money.

Software-defined batteries

JOHN: We talk about a concept that Sonatus called software-defined components. And this is not a term of art in the industry. So let me explain briefly where we believe there are so many components in the vehicle that are often overlooked. You know, of course, certain, you know, engines and high-performance components are often, very well studied. But there are a lot of components in the vehicle that are kind of designed in and then kind of sealed up sometimes in epoxy and then forgotten.

The reality is there’s a lot of opportunities, especially with the EVs for continuous improvement, continuous tuning. So when we talk about software-defined components, what we really mean is doing fine-grained data capture across many components across a vehicle, and then understanding how we can improve the performance, whether it’s capability, efficiency and so on, and then providing those updates to improve the vehicle after shipment.

I noticed with great interest that you guys have a concept called the software-defined battery, and it feels like a very similar idea. I’d love you to tell us about your concept of a software-defined battery.

NADIM: Indeed, the biggest component in the EV is the battery. And if you zoom in further into the battery, it’s not just one big block, it’s even made up of hundreds of little batteries. And even within each one of those, what we call cells, you slice that. And that’s also made of a multitude of tiny, tiny components that are electrodes and layers of materials, what have you. So there is a vast number of components, so to speak, within that battery pack.

JOHN: Right.

NADIM: And surprisingly for a two-terminal device plus-minus, it is insanely complex. The chemistry within that battery is insanely complex. And so unlike electronics, where there have been generations of understanding how to measure a certain component electrically, this is all new territory. How do you measure electrochemistry without really slicing it open? And so what we have done essentially is taken out what has been established, the gold standard in laboratories. Things that are called electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. I’m going to get very geeky for just a very brief moment.

JOHN: That’s fine, yeah.

NADIM: And so that’s been around for 100-plus years. These are benchtop instrumentations that are well established to understand the chemistry in the laboratory. But no one has put that in a vehicle. And so part of our IP is sort of putting that in a vehicle. So we’re making those measurements in a real-time fashion, in the vehicle to understand, what is that component, that battery, each one of them, each single cell… What’s it doing at every moment in time? How is it degrading? Does it have any issues? Is it what you expect from a quality standpoint? Or perhaps there are some minute defects. These minute defects are nanometers. So we’re not talking about big defects. And then measure those, monitor them and over time take the proper corrective actions.

JOHN: Right.

Huge impact from tuning over time

NADIM: And that’s what we do. So we can change dynamically the charging of the vehicle in a very, very subtle way that is imperceptible to the user. But massively important to the chemistry inside the vehicle that yields huge benefits downstream. Because we’re doing this over time. The analogy I give often to my team is: Think of it that you are a physician and you’ve got patients who come to you, but you’re able to measure the blood panel on a daily basis. And you’re making minute corrections to the diet, minute so they don’t even notice that after 10 or 15 years, the impact is enormous.

JOHN: It’s such an important point you made about this ongoing correction over time. And it’s very much something we’ve talked about with software-defined components more generally, because often times one… an engineer or the designer of a component or a subsystem who does a great job – I mean, it’s not that they’re doing a bad job, they do a great job 8– but they design it for a point in time. Well, technology advances. The vehicle ages. They might buy the vehicle in Phoenix and then move to Colorado, which is colder and higher and so on. And so the environmentals, the lifetime, all of these things evolve. But you design it for a fixed point in time before. Well, how is that going to be the right answer? So I think these are very much taking this same idea – we’re talking about more generically, you’re talking about it specifically for batteries – I think that’s very important innovation.

NADIM: And if you’ve been to a battery manufacturing facility or facilities, you’d realize that building batteries is not like building semiconductors. It’s still primitive. No two batteries are ever born equal. So not only what you address, which is the usage is different.

JOHN: Right.

Batteries are not semiconductors

NADIM: But the birth of the battery is also different.

JOHN: It’s true, it’s true. And I come from a semiconductor background as many of our listeners know. And you know, in semi, you know, the defects, they talk about defects per million and they’re looking for like single-digit incredible ludicrous quality. So the chips do come out and they’re quite similar. I mean there’s still some tuning for chip to chip but they’re still very very, very similar. It’s not the case with batteries.

NADIM: No, absolutely not. Vastly different. So you can fight this 1 of 2 ways. You can invest billions and trillions of dollars to make the manufacturing of batteries better. But that’s not economically feasible because there is no equivalent of Moore’s law in batteries. Which means the more expensive you make your equipment, the more expensive the batteries will get. Or you’re going to have to address those deficiencies. Or perhaps, challenges in ways that you can do it through computation. And that works exceptionally well.

Optimizing EV battery cost

JOHN: Well, perhaps that’s a perfect segue to talk about the costs. We mentioned that batteries are the single biggest cost component in an EV, not in conventional vehicles, but certainly in an EV. So what are the opportunities then, to use this kind of technology to bring down cost, while, of course, at the same time maintaining quality and safety?

NADIM: Indeed. So let me just give you some numbers today. If you look at the US, even with the IRA, the batteries in the US are somewhere around $100 to $120 per kilowatt hour. So a typical EV in the US, has got 100 kilowatt hours. That’s around $10,000 for the battery alone. That’s pretty expensive, which is why you see that we’re limited to premium vehicles at this point in time. At the same time, in China today, that cost is between $40 and $60 per kilowatt-hour. Half. Half. And that’s enormous. Now all of a sudden it says, wow, what can I do to bring similar – I’m going to say Chinese batteries because right now we’ve got geopolitical tensions that have different connotations – but similar manufacturing prowess that allows us to bring the cost down to $40 to $60. What China has shown is that you can bring the cost down to that level, which makes it affordable for all the masses globally. Now, when you talk about a $20,000 EV car, it’s doable when your battery’s only $5,000. And that’s, I think, the opportunity in front of us. When we talk about an EV, we should now get past the point of EVs for the affluent folks.

How do we put EVs everywhere? Because if we’re serious about decarbonization, we need to make sure that everybody gets electrification in the backyard.

JOHN: Absolutely. We often talk with this in the show. I mean, our technology is kind of drivetrain agnostic. We’re in conventional ICE engines, hybrids and EVs. But we believe strongly and I believe strongly that EVs have an important role to play. And I think we’ll be a dominant, not necessarily only but a dominant player, in the future. But you’re right. This cost is a key limiter that’s stopping things.

Improving battery quality and safety

JOHN: So if we’re able to have these batteries that are lower cost, how can your software help to keep the quality and keep the safety in those in that environment?

NADIM: So I’m going to give you a couple of examples. The first one is one of safety. When you hop into your car, you don’t want to have any doubt in your mind that your car is going to blow up or catch fire or whatever it is. Today, we’ve resolved this in combustion engines. If you go back 50, or 75 years ago, gasoline fires in the cars were common. I mean, they still happen today, but far less frequently. We need to get to that point in EVs where there is no doubt in our mind and software is absolutely by far the most critical piece to ensure that battery fires do not happen. If a battery might potentially catch fire in the future, you want to single that one out before it happens, not after it happens, and not contain the event, but avoid the event.

JOHN: So is it a question of warning that there’s a problem, or is it actually sort of taking that cell out of circulation so it doesn’t become a problem.

NADIM: Both. Absolutely. So there are multiple layers of security and safety. The first one of course says let me deal with it. I know there’s a problem. Let me do something about it. Isolate the battery, reduce the charging, do different things that we can do to maintain that safety level. If we reach the point where we feel like, okay, this is not working, we’re now basically going to say, “Check Engine Light”, take the car, stop the car, or perhaps even force the driver to evacuate the car. But that is really now we’re talking about 1 in a billion situation, not 1 in 1,000,000. It’s a very last resort.

JOHN: So in most situations, and you’re able to effectively isolate defective cells, is it removing them from circulation or is it de-emphasizing them, what’s the exact technology?

NADIM: It is essentially changing the way… So we’re… the stressing of the battery happens primarily in the charging phase.

JOHN: Okay.

NADIM: And so it’s changing the way the battery’s going to get charged to reduce that stress on the battery and get a bit more longevity out of it. And then in the discharging, which is the driving phase, also you may have some limits. So I’m going to now gun the car on the freeway ramp. We’re not going to do 0 to 60 in two seconds anymore. It may be seven seconds. But these are things that allow you to sort of safely guard that battery until you take it to a shop, replace it, replace the module, or replace the one particular cell.

Stress levels on batteries

JOHN: Yeah, it’s interesting you mentioned about the stressors. We talked about this, earlier that that the charging stress from the the intensity on the battery from the charging is so much more. I think you had some numbers about that. Think about, can you tell our listeners about how much more stressful is during charging versus normal driving?

NADIM: Indeed. So if you think about your charging behavior or driving behavior in a passenger car. Focus on a passenger car for just a moment. You drive typically 300 miles at about– on the freeway– let’s call it 60 miles an hour, approximately. So that’s five hours to discharge, but you want to charge in 15 minutes. So that’s, what’s that, like…

JOHN: An order magnitude or more, Maybe one and a half orders of magnitude

NADIM: 20x more stressful to the battery. And that’s exactly what you get. Most of… The vast majority of the damage happens in the charging. Even your phone, by the way, this is a tidbit for the viewers. You want your phone to live forever? Don’t go to 100%. Charge it to 90%. If you need to travel, granted, go to 100%, but no one is traveling every day, right? Now, when you go to commercial vehicles, which is another segment that we absolutely love, it’s a very different use case. A delivery van, or a class eight 16-wheeler truck. They’re on the road 360 days a year, 24/7.

JOHN: Uptime is critical.

NADIM: Very, very different use case. So they may get charged three times a day. Very stressful. Temperature conditions, they can go from -40C to +50C. Very different conditions. So the software then becomes even more crucial to get to uptime. And to get to economics of the very expensive battery. Very useful to the operator.

Improving battery longevity

JOHN: So today we talked about improving quality and improving performance. But also longevity is so important. So tell me how your algorithms and your technology can really improve the longevity of batteries as well.

NADIM: So in essence, by reducing or managing the stress on the battery in a very subtle way, you can get a lot more life. And by life I mean longevity. Often the “life” terminology is misleading. Thinking about I’m going to get so many miles in one charge. But real life means two things. The driving range on that one day. But also how long would I get usage from that battery over the next five, ten, 15, 20 years?

JOHN: Right.

NADIM: And if you look at sort of historically, cars in the US are on the road for usually about 15 years. And the battery right now, the warranty that you get from the battery maker is about eight years. So you wonder what’s going to happen for those seven years past the warranty expiration. What if my battery goes bad? That’s $15,000, $20,000 replacement. That really is not something that drivers like. As a matter of fact, if you look at the resale value of EVs today, it very much depends on the longevity of the battery. And today with our solutions, we have batteries that will last 2000 cycles. 2000 cycles means 600,000 miles, that’s a million kilometers.

JOHN: That’s great.

NADIM: So you don’t have to worry about longevity. One, the car… It’s like the engine in a combustion engine. How many miles? Good. I’m fine. That’s the resale value of the car.

Documenting battery health for resale

JOHN: Right. And it’s almost as if… We talked about this on a recent episode with another guest about if you could know as the buyer and of course, if you could authentically say as the seller, this vehicle has this high-quality battery. Sometimes phones do this. Now iPhone does this where they’ll say, you know, the battery health is X, so that you, as a buyer can know you’re buying a used phone. You have a high… But that’s not something we have in cars today. If you had the ability to confidently know that this much longevity is left in the vehicle battery, the resale would be much higher. And I think resale of EVs right now is a very fraught area. There’s a lot of uncertainty. There’s a lot of concern about residual value, which is very stressful for the markets and for financial markets, and the resale market. So I think that’s an incredibly valuable opportunity. Am I right?

NADIM: Absolutely. So our software does exactly that. And then so there’s no reason why vehicle makers can not expose that figure to you. As the buyer, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go on a dashboard and sort of say, hey, what is my capacity today? What is my future capacity? I’ll give you a similar example. We deploy it on smartphones in Asia widely. Japan is a geography that we love. DOCOMO, for example, is one of our major customers in Japan, very keen on quality. So DOCOMO phones today, there’s an app, obviously running our software. And the app will actually show you exactly what you said. Here’s the health of my battery today. But beyond that, we offer those DOCOMO users a prediction of where the battery will be in the next six months.

JOHN: That’s great.

NADIM: And so there’s no reason why you can not do the same thing in vehicles.

JOHN: That’s so interesting. And, you know, I must admit, when I look at my phone and I, you know, if I notice the battery health, if it’s beginning to drop a little, it makes you think, oh, maybe I’m not using my– in this case phone example– Maybe I’m not using my phone, or even like charging it in the best way for a longevity. So I almost think you could almost give the users guidance about, you want to preserve the value of your car, whether it’s for yourself or for your downstream buyer who’s going to know. Here are things you could do to maintain the value of your vehicle. Not unlike how you do oil changes or things in a conventional vehicle. Here are the things you can do to maintain the value of your EV.

NADIM: Indeed. Absolutely. Look, transparency is important because the EV adoption is a massive, massive transformation. Not only in economics but also in behavior. When you ask someone who’s been driving a combustion engine car for the last 50 years, oh, please change to an EV, they’re going to say, wait a second, what’s the catch here? And therefore transparency is going to be crucial for them to believe and trust in the system. And the adoption rate. And that’s one key point, the longevity, the adoption of… So understanding how longevity changes over time with the data that we just mentioned is crucial to alleviate those concerns.

The speed bumps in EV transition

JOHN: That’s fantastic. That’s a really interesting new perspective on how this works. You mentioned the ideological shift that many buyers who today might be driving gasoline engines. As they shift to EVs, it’s a big mental shift. And we’re beginning to see that, certainly in the US and in perhaps around the world, that the shift to EVs is hitting some speed bumps. It’s been going up at a fast trajectory, but it’s slowed a little bit in recent years. I wonder if we can talk for a minute about the shift to EVs, and what’s your take on that shift?

NADIM: Indeed. So first I want to make two points here. The first one is the train of electrification has left the station. Between the heat waves, climate tech, and climate change, we have to decarbonize. The question becomes now how do we do it In a very economic way? That’s the challenge. The adoption of EVs or any hurdles that are pushing back against wide adoption of EVs, is primarily around its economics. And to some extent also driving range and the charging infrastructure, indeed. And so how do we improve that? We’ve got to change the economics so it’s affordable to everyone, as we talked about, which really means reducing the cost of the battery and improving the margins for the car makers, because they need to make money in order to make more vehicles and make more models.

JOHN: Yeah, that’s a really important point, because today, even as we said, the EV battery is a key component of the cost, and it’s one of the reasons that EV costs are relatively remaining relatively higher. But also EV margins are very slim for OEMs today because they’re under cost pressure. So if we’re able to reduce battery costs, not only can you simultaneously bring down the cost of the vehicle for consumers, but also offer more margin opportunity for OEMs to make it more attractive.

NADIM: Indeed, Tesla is the only EV maker today who’s making money or has margins on the vehicles. If you look at the other ones, the incumbents, the GMs and the Fords of the world, and the new ones like the Rivians, I mean, they’re bleeding a lot of money when it comes to investing in EV. So we need to make it more affordable to the end user, but also give the OEMs the opportunity of making money, to your point.

So the first one is affordability. And that really goes back down to the battery. The second one is infrastructure. We’re investing in infrastructure. It’s still not where it needs to be. We need to get to the point where the charging infrastructure is akin to the gas station equivalent, where now I can go securely to a charging station that I know is going to be up and not see signs saying apologies were down today, especially if I’m in the middle of nowhere. And also, think about adoption of electrification in the developing world. You go to Africa, Southeast Asia, they’re not going to go spend $50,000 or even $25,000 on a car. And so they’re you’re seeing proliferation of, two-wheelers and three-wheelers and sort of lesser, complex equipment, to electrify. And that’s also something, we have to support that. So as you put that together, you start seeing a faster adoption. Today, the resistance is primarily saying, it’s too expensive, I don’t get the range, I don’t get the certainty. We know what the problems are. We got to go fix them.

JOHN: I mean, EVs are incredible. And if you’ve driven one, it’s very hard to go back. Every time I have to drive– and I say it that way every time I have to drive– a gasoline vehicle, I’m like, gosh, it’s just not as fun to drive as my EV. But at the same time, there are practical realities about these costs we’ve talked about. There are practical realities about the charging infrastructure. Here in California, it’s very easy to charge, but in a lot of places in the country and around the world, it’s not so proliferated. So we have to tackle all of those problems, I think, together simultaneously. And I think we will continue to see an uptick in EV adoption.

NADIM: I want to give you one tidbit that at the same time is promising at the same time, scary. If we were to magically electrify all the vehicles in the US, in the United States overnight– which we won’t, but overnight– we would have to increase our generation, electric generation, by 50%. And that’s not even including AI, by the way. So we’ve got a lot of work to do on the infrastructure side.

JOHN: That’s right. So it needs to happen, you know, as I said, maybe we should add a third angle. There’s cost, and there’s infrastructure. And then there’s also power generation. And it all has to happen simultaneously.

NADIM: Indeed.

Conclusion

JOHN: Look, this is such an interesting conversation. NADIM, thank you for joining us. And getting into the weeds about battery technology and especially I think what’s so interesting about this is if you were to think about a battery, software, it’s probably, as you said, the last thing you would think about. But you’ve really helped us understand the importance of how software can really play an important role in improving batteries in so many different directions like we’ve spoken about. Thank you for joining us.

NADIM: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

JOHN: If you’re enjoying what you’re hearing on The Garage, please like and subscribe to this episode to hear more from thought leaders across the vehicle technology space. Thank you for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you in another episode very soon.