You know the feeling when you're overwhelmed a bit, but by the things you enjoy? This is happening to me right now - so much going on in the EV industry. And I love digging around in it. I hope you'll like what I decided what's worthy of showing you in the newsletter below.

Thank you to the two new founding members this week: Jonathan and Tõnis. Your support means helps us grow the EV Universe a lot.

And all of you who've bought the annual/monthly plans - it's a big deal to me that you've found the content here that valuable. 🙏 I'm humbled. And happy.

Let's dig in!

- Jaan

📈 🎉 Rivian goes public

Make room!

Rivian raised $11.9B in the biggest IPO of the year and the 6th-largest ever on a US stock exchange. Selling 153M shares at $78 per share. Rivian was valued at $76.4B.

$RIVN has been trading since Wednesday and closed today at $122.99, which puts it at a $104.89B market cap. Rivian is now the 4th most valuable automaker in the world, the only ones ahead being Tesla, Toyota, and VW.

Rivian has now graduated from the Hoping these go public soon section of our stock tracker and now sits on the honorable third spot of our EV maker section.

We've got quite a few readers of the EV Universe here from the great team at Rivian too - congratulations on this huge milestone!

We also learned that the company plans to reach 1M annual EV volume by 2030.

Bonus: here's a report on how Ford had to elbow out the rival GM to get in on Rivian about two years ago (link)

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🌎 Global sitrep - where are we heading?

In case you're new here, here's the abbreviations from what I explain below:
EV = battery electric car;
PHEV = plug-in hybrid;
FCEV = fuel-cell electric vehicles.
ZEV = zero emission vehicles, so EVs + FCEVs.
Electrified Vehicles = all of the above.

We constantly dig deep into the EV industry in these newsletters. It's about time we'd take a step back and look at how we're doing on a global scale this far.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance published a special report yesterday at the request of the UK COP26 Presidency called the Zero-Emission Vehicles Factbook.

I'll probably cover the COP26 next week, but here are some of the relevant data for us that I found going through this 61-page report (pdf here).

Present-day

The total EV stock in the first half of 2021 reached 8.5M passenger ZEVs (including FCEVs here, both of them*). This is nearly double of 4.6M from two years ago when COP25 took place.

* Might be a bit more than that, but still doesn't skew the figure.

4.3M (half) of the EV fleet is in China, 2.2M in Europe, and 1.3M in the US. The rest of the world accounts for ~700k EVs.

We're set on the course of 5.6M total electrified vehicles sold in 2021. That's up 80.6% from 3.1M in 2020 and 166% compared to 2.1M in 2019. Not a bad growth curve, huh?

This lead to the EV share of global sales of 5% in the first half of this year. In other words, every 20th car sold globally was a battery electric vehicle. Let's see what we can say same time next year.

Available zero-emission models today: 362, up 37% in two years. I recently put around 100 models in one picture a while back, here's what it looks like:

I counted 48 of them available in Estonia (that's where I'm at) right now. If you're ok with the 6-month waiting time, that is. We've got members all over the world, so I'd love to know, how many pure EVs are available in your country?

Battery production capacity has risen 84% in two years to 586 GWh/year, enough for ~12M electric cars with a 50kWh battery pack. By 2025, this is expected to triple to 2,539 GWh/year (~50.8M EVs). If all goes well, right. Roughly 2/3 of it will be based in China.

Future estimates

The factbook estimates EVs will reach 20-30% of car sales in US, EU, and China by 2025.

Automakers have collectively committed to selling 40M EVs/year by 2030 and 27% of all automakers have ICE phase-out plans in place.

Here's how the different estimations see the global passenger and commercial ZEV fleet grow through 2040:

And here's what the ZEV market share is expected to achieve through 2040:

Also, something a bit surprising to me.

EVs are beating the plug-in hybrids everywhere in market share...except in Europe:

Enough with the graphs, Jaan!

I'll add some juicy summaries on the national targets, price parity, and charging outlook in tomorrow's newsletter (get it for $5/mo here). Or, you know, take a look at them yourself on the BNEF report (pdf).

⚡ What else is new?

🚗 Lucid Motors delivery event recap ^

📈 An update on Sono Motors IPO plans: share price expected between $14-$16, which would put it at a market cap of $140M-$160M. (link)

🌎 Greece wants to ban fossil car sales from 2030 (link).

🌎 Ireland plans to have 1M EVs on its roads by 2030 (link).

⚖️  Greenpeace carried out its threat I wrote about in last week's newsletter, filing a lawsuit against Volkswagen for not ending ICE sales by 2030 and keeping its strategy within the 1.5-degree limit. (link)

⚰️ It's lights out at Byton. The employees have not been paid and production lines have been shut down. (link) Looks like we won't see the M-Byte on the roads, ever, so here's one last look for you:

🚫 Herbert Diess, the face of EVs leading Volkswagen, might be ousted, as the works council issues a vote of no confidence in the CEO (link).

🚯 Volvo published a report on its electric C40 Recharge vs fossil XC40 emissions over 200k km. The electric produces 27-50t depending on the energy mix for charging, while the fossil emits 59t of CO2. (pdf)

PS! The Byton, Diess, and Volvo stories were covered in more detail in our Friday's premium newsletter, already last week.

⚡🚌 The US Congress passes the $1T infrastructure bill and now awaits Biden signing it into law (link). $15B from the bill goes to EVs, half to the charging infra (which we've previously covered a bit more in-depth here) and the other half for electric buses.

🎙️ I had the chance to rant about EVs and building this EV Universe with our friend Martin from Eleport. He's one of the people I call expanding the EV universe and a great host of the Forget Oil podcast, listen here (47min). Fittingly, Forget Oil in short is F oil.

⛏️ Australian mining company European Lithium (I know, right) is set to potentially acquire two promising lithium deposits in Ukraine, which might make them the largest lithium supplier in Europe. (link)

🙏 Two EV-related good-cause efforts:

• If you're a Tesla owner near St. Louis, please consider attending this surprise birthday party on 21th of Nov for a big Tesla fan, 10-year-old Ryan who is paralyzed from the waist down and is looking forward to one day having FSD drive for him. (link). Looks like there are 19 attendees signed up already.
• Toy drive organized by Tesla Owners in Los Angeles on Dec 4th (link).

🚗 Nuro, the US start-up focusing on autonomous delivery EVs, raised a $600M Series D. (link)

💰 Automakers target to spend $515 billion for EVs and batteries through 2030, via a Reuters report (link).

⚡ Tesla Supercharger network reaches 30k chargers worldwide. In two years, we're supposed to be able to announce "90k" here. (link)

🇳🇴 The Norwegian EV association celebrates the milestone of more than 100,000 members in Norway, all driving electric cars (link in Norwegian). That's more than most countries have EVs in total. Hmm, *jots down that I need to create a cumulative EV sales database by country*.

🚗 Tesla added waypoints!!!11oneone By far the most requested feature for navigation. Promised by Musk on the Plaid event, it's here now. It's been so long that it has become a joke on its own now. Owners, rejoice!

📅 Event tomorrow: Battery Pub, a free top battery professionals meetup on Zoom.  There are hundreds of listeners and speakers that are 🔋 professionals from different OEMs, battery suppliers, and universities.

They usually have both breakout networking time and speakers that you can choose from. Bring a beer and join here. More events on our EVent calendar (pro).

👀 I'll keep an eye on this one: Lightship plans to build a proper electric RV. They're looking for engineers. It's super early, but I'm rooting for 'em. Toby and Ben have backgrounds in Tesla & Proterra. 🔒 BYD closes its French e-bus factory, although remaining active in the French market. Not enough orders, they said, as only 30 e-buses had been assembled in the plant since 2017. The plans were to build 200 e-buses per year. (link) Will we know the full story? Probably not.

👎 Chip shortage update: some new BMWs won't have touchscreens (link). Yes, it's that bad. Yes, it's 2021.

🦸‍♀️ GM's CEO Mary Barra's daily driver is a Chevy Bolt EV. (link) And I say that's badass.

⚡ Elon & Twitter...

📉 Elon, the quirkiest CEO I've ever seen, put up a poll on Twitter saying he'll sell 10% of his $TSLA stock holdings to pay for taxes on unrealized gains... if Twitter says so. This comes in the midst of the broader public calling on "the rich to stop avoiding paying taxes".

3.5M people answered and "Yes" was chosen.

Tesla has now sold ~$5B worth of Tesla stock since, and we can expect more. He also exercised his previous stock options, collecting $2.3B worth of shares back. Over the next year, he has billions in more options to exercise before expiration. Imagine this - his stock options exercised this week were at $6.24 per share...

I'm not an expert on this, but looking at the whole situation, it seems Musk was just giving the shareholders a heads up on what will happen and why. This avoids what could've been a little downward spiral with a little panic effect if caught by surprise. If so, well played. No better time to sell than on ATH, huh?

The Tesla share price closed at $1,065 today, about -13.53% from its peak of $1,229 on Nov 4th.

👀 What I'm watching:

In the most superb video production quality (and jokes) I've seen of late, Jason Cammisa of Hagerty shows a Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing vs Tesla Model S Plaid vs BMW M5 CS. Found via Trucks.vc. Drag race and review. You'll enjoy every minute of this 22:55.

I stumbled upon Jay Leno driving his 1909 Baker Electric. He says it's the only car in his garage that doesn't need maintenance. 100 miles on a charge, 23mph, it used to run on Thomas Edison's batteries, the very story of which I covered in the first newsletter over a year ago. It's like driving a phone booth:

A fun viewpoint that I saw a few days ago: why do most EVs still have grilles? The same reason these first cars looked like horse carriages. The newcomers either lack new vision or try to "ease" the new customers by having a familiar design to the old and "safe".

Tesla FSD avoids a deer with fast reflexes. I love the real-life applications the system (should/might/will) have:

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🐤 Tweet of the week:

Hertz displayed its yellow rental Tesla in Times Square. Quite the ad campaign for Tesla, this Hertz deal turned out to be. And vice versa. In case you missed it, here's our recap of the deal.

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