With Laurent Seglement from London and Gerard read from Berlin.
This is redefining energy linutes today on redefind erg. While Gerard is the rock star at ted X, I brought a special friend Roger Atkins. Roger Atkins is one of the top voice for EV's. Is that correct, Roger.
I'll take that. Yeah, that's fine, thank you.
We're all sitting on our desk and we'll reports and looking at charts and you know, Bloomberg. But at the end of the day, the story of the incredible development of EV's is a story of people, and Roger, you are the ultimate storyteller.
Well, I hope I'm going to live up to that billing. Thank you. It's something I've been doing sort of for twenty years, primarily through LinkedIn. Yeah, it is a story of people, You're absolutely right, champions of change, brave people, entrepreneurs and often then people that their names just aren't familiar, people have never heard of them, but they have been, in my opinion, pivotal to where we are today and where we're going to be tomorrow.
I love when we meet and you'll always have those great andecdotes, and I mean one of them is probably the meeting you at that the Chinese embassy about fifteen years ago.
Well it wasn't the Chinese Embassy. What had happened was I was working at Modek, which was a company building an electric truck back in two thousand and seven in the UK. They came to market in two thousand and seven, which was exciting, which was amazing. We had no idea we were so innovative. A UK company using LFP batteries Thundersky cells assembled into a battery pack by a Scottish
company called Axion. Yeah, that's where the journey began. But two thousand and seven is just before the financial crisis, and then we found ourselves in great difficulty. The Chinese ambassador to the UK, Madam Fu Yin, invited a number
of industrialists, including Jamie Borick, a founder of Modek. He was unavailable to go and have lunch with the other people and the ambassador, so I went in his place, and to cut a long story short, I got on very well with the ambassador because I introduced myself in Chinese. I only knew a little bit, but just doing that seemed to have an impact. And then she said, mister Akins, you should bring your company to China by then. This is the autumn of two thousand and nine. She says,
bring your company to China. We know you're in financial difficulty because everybody in the West is. But we have grand plans for what we call new energy vehicles. She said, you call them electric vehicles. So I said, well, why do you call them new energy vehicles? Said, well, because ultimately they need to be charged up with renewable energy, and we have a big ambition in our country to do this. So we'd like you to come bring your company to China. We'll help you. You can help us,
will help you. That's called collaboration. Way above my pay grade to agree that kind of thing on the spot. But if it had been my company, I would have said yes. As it turned out, we didn't. What it meant was I got early sight of something which really very few people had any sense of at that time, that there was going to be a significant move in China in regards to the auto industry, energy and batteries.
For the best of fifteen years, you've met extraordinary people. One of them is the CEO of CTV.
Yeah, Robin Zeng. I found myself at the China Auto Show earlier this year, twenty twenty four, and a mutual friend, Jack Cheng, who's one of the founders of NEO. I was with Jack and we saw Robin, and you know, I was a bit in awe Robins in the battery world, as you know, a bit of a rock star. So I said to Jack, I'd love to meet Robin Zeng. So he just took me straight over and introduced me, as you know, the electric cowboy. There I am with a cowboy hat, the sunglasses, the usual, and we had
a quick exchange, a little chat. Yeah, hopefully there's a good follow up to that. But that was in many ways, my passion and real excitement of meeting Robin had been fueled even more than than it had for years, to
be honest, by Bob Gallian. Bob Gallian an American engineer, an American automotive legend in some people's minds, because he was at GM with the EV one way back and had been on an incredible journey, had been the CTO for c ATL for a good number of years, I think seven or eight years, and was very much pivotal in enabling Robin to fast track that company and Bob's become a friend. I've met Bob several times, We've talked at different events. We met last week, we'll be meeting
again soon. And I enjoy being in Bob's company because he's just a really nice person, but he really understands what's going on.
Roger, among the people you met, you had the encounter with Elon Musk So how did you go.
Well, a brief encounter, but yeah, very exciting. When they asked for my name, I stuttered. I don't normally do that, but it was the moment I said, Hi, Elon, it's Roger. It's because you know in a bit of all of him. It was ten years ago. It was at the opening of the Tesla store in Westfield, London, and my question was out of battery swapping, wireless charging and fast cable chap arging Elon, what do you think the journey's going to be with those three and will one of them
ultimately prevail? And Elon said, well, wireless charging maybe not because of inefficiency and alignment. Battery swapping, he said, we've engineered it into the mode less. You can actually battery swap the mode less automatically in a facility. So they showed that, but better place had come and gone by that time, and I don't think he wasn't a fan, but he said, if customers want it, we'd do it. So he concluded that ultimately the story would all be
about cabled fast charging. And of course that's ten years ago. If I asked him the same question again, I'm pretty certain the answer would be different in one particular area. So yeah, that was my elon encounter. And as a Bersun, he was very polite when he used to do his town hall call it what you will, going around the world meeting and talking to people, he was always super polite. The way he answered my question wasn't flippant, it was ice and concise he was. I think he was very courteous,
and I've seen him do that many many times. I think behind closed doors he is an absolute ogre, a nightmare because he is so fixated with progressing things, and for as many aspects that we can all criticize him for, I would suggest that the return of rockets back down onto the Earth is as significant technically as landing a man on the moon was in nineteen sixty nine, because the difference there is Okay, we had a number of lunar missions, Apollo missions, twelve people were on the Moon,
but it hasn't happened since because it was technically possible but horrendously expensive. The difference and the significance of what Elon's done with space travel with rockets is that it could be done over and over again. It's one thing to solve a problem technically, it's another thing to do it at the right cost level. That feeds into much of your work, the work of many people listening to this. The real test, ironically isn't necessarily the technical challenges to overcome.
It's the business model. It's the economic proposition.
When you're in contact with those great CEOs and CEOs, do you see a cultural alignment or do you see some very different intus between I would say incubans and rising styles.
So I think in Asia, and let's talk specifically China. Thinking back to what Madame fu Ying said all those years ago. China's got on with tackling climate change as best it can. And yes, it has a lot of coal fired power stations, but it also has a massively significant number of solar farms wind farms, So in many ways China has got it and has been more demonstrable in doing something about it than the West. And that's
a big cultural difference. And unfortunately that's all mixed up and ming good now with industry with incumbents and disruptors, certainly the big challenge on the auto industry for America and Europe, it's all become a bit of a conundrum.
Okay, I'm a number of guys, so I'm going to give you a few numbers. And of course I'm an avid reader of Michael Dunn, who is for me the best and at EASTA Yeah, ordinary.
Yeah, I'd agree. I'd agree with that.
China did not export any cars six or seven years ago. This year they're going to export six million cars. Seventy five percent of them are Ice. Yes, And of course the market share of Chinese brands in China, which used to be less than thirty percent, now it's seventy percent, which means Volkswagen GM had been fisting on China and
bringing back billions every year. The game is over because the China money really helped all the Western auto industry for fifteen years to give dividends and probably even the thing changes because times were good. You want numbers I'll give you numbers. Those six million cars exported. If I do a bit of a back of the enveloped calculation, that's one hundred and twenty billion dollar. China imports three
one hundred billion dollars avoid per year. So climate change everybody goes to cup every say, oh, climate change is so important. But I look at the numbers. China imports three hundred billion dollar avoid per year, and that is a strong motivation to develop electric Well, of course it.
Is, and an energy security is absolutely at the front of this. If you look at the origin, go back to people, go back to you know, who are the people architects of this. You look at the Audi engineer. There's the irony Chinese guy who worked for Audi for many years, then becomes the architect of the new energy revolution in China. It comes back, becomes the science minister we're talking about gang and effectively says we can leap
frog the West. We'll never catch up with combustion engines, but we can leap frog them with electric vehicle technology. And then they look at what happened in America. This is the irony they've really learnt from. People will call it copying, but they've learned from America in what carb did with the challenge of air quality, particularly in Los Angeles many years ago. They saw the structure of how
they managed that. They also saw how the Japanese developed a battery capability to power up the consumer electronics industry, and they coupled those two things together brilliantly so. But they didn't do it at night. They didn't do it with the curtains drawn. They did it with everybody watching. So your point a moment ago about the money that's been made by Western OEMs in China for many, many years,
ten fifteen, almost twenty years. To give it a biblical analogy, that's the seven years of good harvest and now the challenge in the transition to manage the transition to full electrification. But what have they done with that money? Did they spend that money on large scale and scoping investing in R and D terms, Yes, some of it, but certainly
not enough. And they're now winging that the Chinese are coming in with all of this, when we had every opportunity, year after year after year to actually either keep apace with China or maybe keep ahead of China, but we chose not to why, because, of course, it's if it ain't broke, don't fix it philosophy, And for shareholders, for supervisory boards, for all the other people, it was why do we need to change if we're making money hand
over fists selling the internal combustion proposition, And just as a quick tangent on that, only recently a seer put out a notification saying, look at the numbers, look at the trends, look at what the consumer actually wants. They don't seem to want ev and there's an increasing negative narrative which is fueled by all sorts of people for
all sorts of vested interest reasons. That yeah, is kicked the cavern down the road, and it's being at That narrative is being engineered, which is why I feel a sense of responsibility to say what I see, to be independent and to use the forty years I've had in the auto industry to say it as I see it. And there are some things I'm wrong about. I'm not an engineer, I'm not a chemist. I'm not particularly academic, to be frank, going back to your point, it's getting to know.
People talk about those people.
I bumped into. Leis shue Fu were in two thousand and five or six when I worked at London Taxis And look at where Geelie's gone on that journey. It's extraordinary to watch how people have progressed the ten years I've done my own thing. Simon Moore's the guy that bounded Benchmark with an amazing team. I met Simon five years ago, or and his address to the US Senate arg know that you know that moment we are in the midst of a global battery arms ratio which the
United States is a bystander. Oh my god, that's like a movie sequence. Now that, now, through Simon and all of the people I've met as a consequence, has really enriched my storytelling. Let me make a distinction by the way, I've been on LinkedIn for twenty years, almost since it started. I pride myself on being a storyteller, not an influencer. I don't want to take paid for content and put it in front of people and suggest that this is good.
That's not what I am. I actually do get paid to occasionally show up on stage, which I absolutely love because I shouldn't tell anyone this, but you know I do it for nothing because in the dim and distant past. I was in the music business and to be frank, I'd rather be a rock star now. But I suppose you are.
A rock star. Roger, Well, who are people recognize you when you go from Australia to Canada to Europe. When you show up, people know who you are. I know you're very umber, but I can take you. You say you're one of the voices, but you're one of sort of the faces of the Ivy Revolution and probably in China now it's mainstream. But you know, in the old world, we're still the mavericks. We're still the one carrying the positive aspect, which is a positive of tech, energy, security,
the environment. Now we need to make sure the jobs stay here.
Yes, yes, lour, I'm completely with you. I'm British, I'm European, I'm a citizen of the world. So that's the lens through which I see things. And you mentioned being recognized. Of course, I got an ego like everybody else, and I'm flattered by that fact. But I have to when I can feel that or see that, use that responsibly. I'll give you a quick anecdote when I went to China Evy one hundred. This is a forum in China
that brings together politicians, investors, entrepreneurs, et cetera. It's been running since twenty fifteen, I think it is, and essentially it gets stuff done because it's annual and people say what did we say we're going to do, and there's a little bit of reconciliation, then they plan what they're
going to do next. It's a brilliant forum. The first one I went to as part of a British trade delegation, somebody that I was connected to in China and LinkedIn met me and said, oh, we're very pleased you'll hear a few people know what you do. And I was sort of a bit surprised, not quite sure how to take that, but then she said who would you like to meet, and I almost jokingly said, well, it would be good to meet Chairman Wang Chang Fu byd the guy over there, Lee Bin or William Lee had just
set up next TV, which is NEO. So she took me to the front of the hall and introduced me to Chairman Wang Chang Fu and said, Roger is on LinkedIn. He talks about electric vehicles. He has broad outlook at a pragmatic approach. You should say hello, and then through a bit of an aturb we had a chat. Same with Lee Bin. So yes, it's nice to have that recognition, but it's only really good if you can then put
it to good use. It's a responsibility. I'll truly take it as a responsibility to use those connections, to use that access to get to talk to people and ask them the question that I think someone on LinkedIn. Whenever I write, I write in the first person. So if I'm posting on LinkedIn, I'm talking to you rather than the audience, because so that's what I try to do. So thank you for what you've said. But it's equally a big responsibility to be frank.
Well, Roger, it was a very nice conversation, and I really would like to say to all our listeners, but I'm sure a lot of them already your followers to follow Roger on LinkedIn, but also go to all of your shows where you are with your your moor, your candor, but also your integrity promoting ev because that's the world of the future. This clear.
We've got to explain it to people in a fashion that helps them take the journey. A bit of pushing and shoving now and then, for sure, but mostly it should be cajoling, informing, educating, and yeah, maybe even entertaining. Entertaining. Now and then, why not, can I just say, I'm so flattered to be on your show, because, like Michael Dunn's podcast, like stuff that I see from people like Bill Russo and Robert Llewellen are fully charged actively listen
to these, I listen and learn to a lot. I've never read as much in my life as I do these days. I've never listened as much as I do these days. So I'm an unashamed plagiarist. And I then try and take all of that, shake it down into a bit of a thought process, a bit of a storyline, and that's what I pop up on LinkedIn now and then, thank you Roger, thank you Laurel, thank you for listening
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