Driving with Dunne

There are a lot of people in America and Europe willing to tell you that they "know China." In reality, very few Westerners really understand China. Fewer still can communicate what they know in clear and compelling terms. Then there is John Pomfret, a China veteran with deep hands-on experience. He is also an outstanding writer. Pomfret's landmark book, The Beautiful Country and The Middle Kingdom, is a tour de force that traces the relationship between the United States and China over the past 220 years. It is a relationship that shifts from wonderfully warm to icy cold and back -- over and over and over again. Pomfret's newest book, From Warsaw With Love, takes us to Central Europe to uncover the special relationship between the the spy networks in Warsaw and Washington. This relationship has never been more important, given Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's unrelenting efforts to swing Europe in its favor. Pomfret is smart, direct and street-smart. #DrivingWithDunne / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGohttps://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/

Meet VinFast, Vietnam's young, bold and relentless EV champion. In late December, 2022, Madame Thuy Le, VinFast CEO, supervised operations at the port in Haiphong as the first 999 VinFast VF 8s were loaded aboard a ship to San Francisco. This month, American customers started taking delivery of the all-electric crossovers. The speed with which 5-year old VinFast started exporting cars to America is unprecedented. Remember that Japanese and Korean automakers worked for decades before gathering the resources and the courage to put their products to the test with American consumers. How did VinFast get ready so quickly? And how does the little-known company plan to win the trust of American car buyers? In this episode, CEO Thuy Le walks us through the pivotal early days of VinFast. We also discover how she carves aside time for a special hobby that requires 4:30am wakeups.#WinningInAsia / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGo https://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=en https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/

Have you been searching for an expert go-to source for knowledge on batteries? Look no further, Battery Brunch is here. In 2019, MIT graduates and Silicon valley battery scientists Yen Yeh (Voltaiq), Linda Jing (Tesla) hosted the first ever Battery Brunch, a small gathering of a dozen battery minds in the Bay Area. Today, Battery Brunch has blossomed into a hugely valuable meeting point for thousands of people in the battery industry: founders, engineers, investors, policy makers and more. Yen Yeh and Linda Jing host Battery Brunch weekly on Saturday mornings. There are more than 20,000 Battery Brunch members and between 500 and 1,000 people attend every session. In this week's Driving With Dunne podcast, we learn what inspired Yen and Linda to found battery brunch. And how the organization is accelerating the development of the global ecosystem around batteries. #DrivingWithDunne / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGohttps://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/

In November, 2022 Lordstown Motors began delivering Endurance full-size electric trucks to fleet customers in America. Lordstown, named after the city in northeast, Ohio, represents an important new chapter in America's automotive manufacturing history. Lordstown is the designer and engineer of the electric vehicle. Samsung supplies the battery. And Foxconn, the powerhouse Taiwanese maker of our iPhones and iPads, is the manufacturer of the final product. This marks an important step in Foxconn's ambitions to weave itself into the fabric of American industry. The relationship also allows Lordstown to work with Foxconn MIH to develop other future vehicles from a single platform. What this means for Joe or Jane pickup truck customer: Potentially many more affordable choices for American consumers beyond the offerings from legacy players in Detroit, Wolfsburg, Seoul and Tokyo. #DrivingWithDunne / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGohttps://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/

There is a once-in-a-hundred-years revolution underway in Europe. For many decades, cities in Europe have been built to serve the car. Now the mayors of cities like Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Brussels are taking steps to change roads into living spaces for people, bicycles, trees, flowers and kids playgrounds. People are taking to the streets to take back the streets. Cars are still welcome but now they are woven together with other ways to get around. This movement has been led by a cast of highly impressive women like Anne Hildago, Mayor of Paris and Sophie Haestorp Anderson Lord Mayor of Copenhangen. We can now add a new star to this list: Elke van den Brandt, Minister of Mobility for Brussels. Elke joins us today to tell the story of how she and her team in Brussels are opening up the city to many forms of transportation, safer and quieter streets and cleaner air. #DrivingWithDunne / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGohttps://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/

Imagine you're in the market for a full size pickup truck. And you like the F-150, America's best-selling vehicle for the past 40 years. But, wait, there's a new twist in the decision-making process. Should you get a gasoline-powered F-150 or the electric F-150 Lightning? To get answers, we turn to our guest today, Darren Palmer. Darren is the Vice President of Electric Vehicles in Ford's Model e division. Darren reports to Doug Field, recently recruited from Apple, and Field reports to CEO Jim Farley. Put another way, Darren is way up there at Ford and knows the Lightning specs and performance better than anyone on the planet. In this week's Driving With tDunne conversation, I ask Darren a simple but tough question. If I choose the Lighting over the gasoline F-150, what am I gaining -- and what am I giving up? Palmer shares some remarkable data bophut F-150 Lightning customers. More than half of them never owned a Ford before. And close to 80% had never owned an electric vehicle. Palmer makes the compelling argument that the Lightning is a new product category, fundamentally different from the F-150s powered by engines. This episode lets you listen to Darren and make your own conclusions. #DrivingWithDunne / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGohttps://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/

When she was an engineering student at MIT, Kristin Slanina led her team to victory in a solar car race through five states in America's northeast. That early achievement inspired Kristin, decades later, to launch Charge Across America, a contest featuring teams driving from New York to Los Angeles in five different electric cars. The main purpose of the competition was to assess the readiness of America's charging networks. How reliable, how fast, how convenient? In this episode Kristin recounts the highs and lows of the cross-country drive. And she also gives a grade to American's EV charging networks as they stand today. And what American can be doing to speed the pace of change to cleaner, greener, cheaper energy. #DrivingWithDunne / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGohttps://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/

In Part I of this conversation, Reilly Brennan described how the days of late October, 2022 will go down in history as some of the most important in the history of autonomous vehicles. In the space of just a few days, one company (Argo AI) went out of business, Tesla was taken to court for its Autopilot system and Reilly Brennan experienced a transcendent "before and after" moment when taking the Cruise robotaxi on a flawless 40 minute trip through the street of San Francisco. In this week's Part 2 of the conversation we look at the next giant hurdle for autonomous vehicles: Profitability. Cruise, Waymo, Baisu and other AV companies are still plowing through tens of billions of dollars in development costs. When will these companies be able to scale up their robotaxi fleets in multiple cities and become commercially viable? Put another way, now that Cruise has established proof of concept on the technology front, how long before we see proof of profit? #DrivingWithDunne / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGohttps://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/

Scour the planet and you are unlikely to find anyone who knows the business of autonomous vehicles (AVs & ADAS) better than Reilly Brennan, Co-Founder, Trucks Venture Capital. Over the past ten years, Brennan has taken rides in more than 100 autonomous vehicles. He and his partners at Trucks Venture Capital have also invested in dozens of startups in the AV ecosystem, including leading innovators like Gatik, May Mobility, AEye and NuTonomy. In this week's Driving With Dunne conversation, Brennan reveals why his recent 40 minute ride in a Cruise robotaxi through the streets of San Francisco was a mind-altering experience. What acts of technological magichad Cruise managed to perform? Where had Cruise broken through? Brennan also lays out in vivid terms the crucial distinction every driver should make between autonomous cars and vehicles that are enhanced through advanced driver assistance systems. #DrivingWithDunne / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGohttps://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/

Almost half of all humans now live in cities. By 2300 that number will climb to 75%. With so much population density, how will people get around? Horace Dediu and Roman Meliska have some powerful ideas. The future of transportation in cities is smaller, lighter, quicker and smarter. There is a shift underway to new modes of transportation that they call Micromobility. It is not the end of the car. But perhaps the end of an era in which cities are built to accommodate cars exclusively. What are these alternative forms of transportation? How much do they save us in terms of money, time and the environment? And which cities are the pioneers of the Micomobility revolution?#DrivingWithDunne / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGohttps://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/