

Driving with Dunne
Dunne Insights LLC
Electric vehicles are the future. But with new technologies comes confusion! What's real? And what is hyperbole? Who are the people to know and what are their visions? Leading global electric vehicle innovators and executives join Michael J. Dunne in no-nonsense conversations about what that electric future looks like. Speaking with some of the biggest in the field like Fisker, NIO, Lucid, Xpeng and more, Dunne - author, entrepreneur and keynote speaker – knows the business of electric vehicles. He’s going to answer questions like: Which EV brands are the best? Why is the charging experience so unpredictable? Who makes the best battery? The electric vehicle revolution is a global race that China now leads with America way back in their rear view mirror. Who will win out - and why? Every episode of Driving With Dunne equips you with powerful new knowledge about the future of these battery-propelled computers on wheels.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Sep 29, 2022 • 36min
Henry Sanderson, Author, Volt Rush: Winners and Losers in Race to Go Green
Henry Sanderson witnessed the explosion in demand for cars in China while living in Shanghai and Beijing from 2007 to 2014. He found the pace and magnitude of growth alarming. Then he returned to London where he began covering minerals and commodities for the Financial Times. Soon, he realized the world was stepping to a global super cycle around the minerals that feed into batteries. Demand for critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, copper and nickel were on track to explode in line with the world's voracious appetite for electric cars. Sanderson takes us inside the complex and high-stakes world of mining, an area where companies are quietly making billions of dollars. Who will be the winners and who will be the losers in this race for supremacy in electrics, batteries, battery supply chains and minerals? Sanderson delivers an accurate and up-to-date picture of the players, the regulators and the costs of going green on the Driving With Dunne podcast. #DrivingWithDunne / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGohttps://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/

Sep 22, 2022 • 32min
Launching Gigafactory Startups in Europe and America: Lars Carlstrom, Founder, Italvot & Statevolt
Lars Carlstrom is a Swedish-born entrepreneur with a gift for identifying the next big opportunity. In 2019, he co-founded Britshvolt and quickly persuaded industrialists and politicians in the UK to endorse the idea of a national champion British battery company. In 2021, Carlstrom founded Milan-based Italvolt. Earlier this year, Carlstrom announced the formation of Statevolt in Imperial Valley, California. Lars tells us he was motivated by the opportunity to introduce new technologies that will deliver cleaner air to cities. But more than anything else, Lars was inspired by the prospect of creating new jobs. His sites in the UK, Italy and America are all venues of former industrial glory which have gone dormant in recent decades. Mr Carltrom calls the move to electrification a once-in-a-hundred years phenomenon. He also says that we are in the very early stages of the transformation. #DrivingWithDunne / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGohttps://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/

Aug 25, 2022 • 35min
Emily Hersh, CEO, Luna Lithium. Building A World-Class Mineral Exploration Company in America
Meet Emily Hersch, founder and CEO of Luna Lithium, a mineral exploration company. Emily is leading a new wave of American entrepreneurs exploring and mining the essential ingredient for battery electric vehicles: Lithium. Emily is one of the most impressive, spontaneous and colorful guests we have ever had on the Driving With Dunne podcast. In our conversation, Emily delivers a direct and concise picture of the global lithium mining industry. She shares her point of view on why the Inflation Reduction Act is mostly a good thing for the battery industry, why China dominates global battery supply chains and how she came to name her company Luna Lithium. #DrivingWithDunne / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGohttps://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/

Aug 18, 2022 • 38min
How to Buy An Affordable Electric Vehicle with Author Matt DeLorenzo
Are you struggling to find an affordable electric vehicle? You are not alone. The average price of a new electric vehicle sold in America in 2022 is a stunning $66,000. That’s more than a house in Detroit or Topeka. But if you look long and hard enough, you can still tease out some bargains. So says Matt DeLorenzo, author of a timely and practical new book called How to Buy An Affordable Electric Vehicle. DeLorenzo parks a small electric car in the driveway that cost him less than $20,000 after incentives. How did he do it? #WinningInAsia / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGo https://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=en https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/

Aug 4, 2022 • 24min
Meet Battery Brunch With Yen Yeh, Co-Founder, Volta Foundation
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/

Jul 28, 2022 • 40min
Charging Ahead: GM, Mary Barra & the Reinvention of an American Icon With Author David Welch
David Welch, the highly regarded veteran Bloomberg reporter, has written a timely and important book about how Mary Barra is leading a total makeover of General Motors. Barra's mission has been to transform GM from large and cumbersome and arrogant to a company that is lean, quick and profitable. The path to a flourishing GM, Barra believes, is total commitment to electric and autonomous vehicles, the two most transformative technologies of our era. Getting there means killing sacred cows and making tough calls. Under Barra's leadership, GM exited many markets around the world, including long-standing GM outposts in Europe, Australia, India and South Africa. This has freed up capital to concentrate investments in the all-important Ultium battery platform and Cruise, the highly innovative autonomous vehicle subsidiary based in San Francisco. Will Barra's monumental efforts to put GM on a new, winning trajectory succeed? Author Welch gives success an 80% change, provided that GM can shake an apparent generational jinx that has best the automaker since the 1990s. #DrivingWithDunne / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGohttps://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/

Jul 21, 2022 • 33min
VinFast: The Relentless Vietnamese EV Startup
In early July, 2002 Michael Dunne traveled to Vietnam to take a closer look at VinFast, the remarkably young and ambitious manufacturer of electric vehicles. VinFast is a subsidiary of Vingroup, the largest private company in Vietnam. Chairman and Founder Pham Nhat Vuong and VinFast CEO Madame Thuy are determined to make VinFast a global success. An standard VinFast company mantra is "making the impossible possible." VinFast will start delivering their all electric vehicles to markets in America, the Netherlands, France and Germany by the end of the year. In this episode Dunne gathers with Chris Donovan, the producer of the Driving With Dunne podcast, to share what he saw and heard on the ground in Vietnam. Listen to find out why Vietnam is fast-becoming the darling among investors looking at destinations in Asia beyond China.#DrivingWithDunne / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGohttps://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/

Jun 22, 2022 • 36min
Will Holograms Kick Out Touch Screens? Jamieson Christmas, Founder, Envisics
Envisics is a UK-based technology company with deep expertise in holography. So, what are holograms? Those are the three dimensional images we see in sci-fi movies that originally appeared in the Star Wars series. Envisics projects informational holograms outside of the vehicle in the line of vision, about three feet in front of the driver's eyes. Think of it as a colorful head up display in three dimensions. The single biggest advantage of holography is safety. The driver does not need to look away toward the center stack screen where he or she might seek to secure information about navigation or speed. Instead holograms render objects in the line of sight, embedded into the road and its real surroundings.. Envisic's holograms are expected to appear on Cadillac Lyriqs in late 2022 ro 2023. Founder Jamieson Christmas earned a PhD at Cambridge and is convinced that his technology will win widespread adoption simply because it is safer and more intuitive than looking at those giant touch screens that now dominate many of our vehicles from Teslas to Lucids to F-150 Lightnings.#DrivingWithDunne / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGohttps://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/

Jun 15, 2022 • 38min
The Global Race for Battery Supremacy: From America to Japan to Korea to China and Back to America? Paul Beach, CEO, Octillion Power Systems
Octillion Power Systems supplies lithium-ion battery systems to car, truck and bus makers worldwide. The company has delivered more than 650,000 electric vehicle batteries to automaker,, including to the wildly successful made-in-China Wuling Mini EV. Octillion's new offices in Richmond, California serve as headquarters for company operations in North and South America. Mr Paul Beach, President of Octillion, has been at the forefront of the battery business since the late 1990s. In this episode, Beach recounts how he witnessed massive investment in lithium ion batteries in Japan, then in Korea and most recently in China. As a result, North Asia accounts for more than 90% of global battery production today. But change is afoot. Tens of billions dollars of fresh investments are going into new battery plants in Europe and the United States. What do America and Europe need to do to close the gap with Asia? Who will be the eliminate winner on the global battery arms race? And what is the next great innovation in batteries? #DrivingWithDunne / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGohttps://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/

Jun 8, 2022 • 55min
Gene Berdichevsky, CEO, Sila Nanotechnologies: From Ukraine to Stanford to Tesla To Founding A $3 Billion Battery Startup
Gene Berdichevsky's life could come straight out of a James Bond movie. Born in the Ukraine, raised in Russia, he and his family immigrated to America when he turned nine years old. Along the way, he had lived for five years north of the arctic circle. Berdichevsky studied engineering at Stanford and convinced Tesla founders to make him employee No. 7. Today, Berdichevsky is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sila Nanotechnologies. In 2022, Sila won a landmark contract to supply batteries to the exclusive Mercedes G Wagon, starting in 2025. Berdichevsky's deep expertise in developing silicon-based anodes has attracted investors from every time zone. Sila is currently valued at more than. $3 billion. Sila is one leader among a wave of new battery startups in America that are positioned to help the United States close the battery capabilities gap with China. #DrivingWithDunne / #ZozoGo https://twitter.com/Dunne_ZoZoGohttps://www.instagram.com/zo.zo.go/?hl=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-dunne-a696901a/