--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You've heard of Tesla, but how about Nikola? Turns out there's not one but two electric car companies named after the legendary inventor and the founder of the other one just got convicted of fraud. Trevor Milton, the 40-year-old founder of electric truck manufacturer Nikola, convicted by a federal jury Friday of one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I know this is confusing because the Tesla guy is also borderline committing fraud online all the time. The top priority I would have is eliminating the spam and scam bots and the bot armies that are on Twitter. But stick with me here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The founder of Nikola was just convicted by a federal jury of fraud bragging about technology he didn't possess to boost the stock value of his company. The story's kind of bananas and reminds us how much work remains to realize Joe Biden's all-electric dream.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's momentarily on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from the FIFA World Cup of all things. The FIFA World Cup 26 is coming to North America next summer. It is the ultimate celebration of sports and culture.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can get closer to the beautiful game with a hospitality package. Closer to the action. The best seats. The best suites. Closer to match day and that world-class food and that world-class entertainment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Closer to the experience of a lifetime. Book a hospitality package at fifaworldcup.com slash hospitality.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What do you think today explained this? I don't know.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sean Ramos from here with Ben Foldy from The Wall Street Journal, who used to write about cars, but now writes about financial crimes, which sort of makes him the perfect person to tell you about Nikola.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Yes, Nikola, the first name of Nikola Tesla, the Croatian, I believe, engineer of about a century ago.
--:-- Ben Foldy: What's conducting the electricity? Our bodies, Mr. Angier, are quite capable of conducting and indeed producing energy.
--:-- Ben Foldy: So in the summer-spring of 2020, there were what I would maybe call the second generation of electric vehicle companies.
--:-- Ben Foldy: So the first generation of startups was Tesla, another company called Fisker. Fiskers don't make noise when they start up, just so you know.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Fisker Automotive didn't survive, went bust. And Tesla obviously kind of survived, took off, thrived eventually, and became the most valuable car company in the world in 2020.
--:-- Ben Foldy: I don't want to give the impression that I thought Tesla would be successful from the beginning. I actually thought we would fail.
--:-- Ben Foldy: You did? Really?
--:-- Ben Foldy: Oh, yeah, yeah. I thought we'd maybe have a, I don't know, 10%, 20% chance of success.
--:-- Ben Foldy: I mean, startups in general fail, and auto startups especially fail.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Sure. And then you have the second generation of kind of new startups. Rivian is among the most serious competitors lining up to take on Tesla.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Lucid Motors, it has announced that it received a $1 billion investment from the Saudi Investment Fund.
--:-- Ben Foldy: TV company Electric, last mile, will begin trading today at the Nasdaq.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And so most of those companies started going public around 2020. Nikola was the first of those.
--:-- Ben Foldy: It was the poster child of the exuberance for this kind of second generation of startups.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And for people who, you know, maybe thought they missed the boat on Tesla stock, it was kind of, there was this moment in the summer of 2020 where it seemed like, oh, well, you might have missed the boat on Tesla, but look at all these other new EV companies that can take, you know, these huge market shares and become as valuable as Tesla.
--:-- Ben Foldy: We can all agree that whether it is a commercial vehicle, an SUV, a sports car, whatever, Chances are, within the next decade, they're all going to be electric.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And it's a big market opportunity.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And Nikola was the first of those to go public, and it was also the first to kind of fall apart.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Where does Nikola's story start? Quite literally, it starts in Utah.
--:-- Ben Foldy: A founder named Trevor Milton decided to name his company Nikola.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Like some of the best inventions in the world, by coincidence, or by having chance, they started in a basement.
--:-- Ben Foldy: My basement.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And the vision here was that you could have a, you know, an 18-wheel semi-truck that was powered by what's called a hydrogen fuel cell.
--:-- Ben Foldy: It's really that the only fuel out there doesn't create any emissions or byproducts.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Incredible.
--:-- Ben Foldy: The only byproducts is water.
--:-- Ben Foldy: So as this truck goes down the road, the only thing coming out of this truck will be drips of water.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And I think everyone around the world is going to be cheering for that.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And this is as opposed to other EV systems, which are just chiefly what? Batteries?
--:-- Ben Foldy: So when most people talk about electric vehicles, they're talking about battery electric vehicles, which use, you know, lithium ion batteries, which are the same thing that you'll find in your laptop.
--:-- Ben Foldy: But the issue with that is when you're using them at the level that you need to power a car, they're heavy.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And the thing about trucking is that the main prerogative of a trucker is to carry as much weight as possible.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And so the more weight you need to have batteries to carry around the weight that you're pulling, the more you're cutting into that weight.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Tell me about the guy who was promising this hydrogen fuel cell technology at Nikola.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Yeah, so Nikola was founded by a man named Trevor Milton.
--:-- Ben Foldy: He's 40 years old.
--:-- Ben Foldy: He doesn't have what people might kind of think of, you know, the background of a kind of visionary tech founder might look like.
--:-- Ben Foldy: He didn't finish high school.
--:-- Ben Foldy: He didn't finish community college.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And, you know, instead of kind of those types of experiences, he had these kind of successive businesses, but not in businesses that you'd necessarily would think lead to a hydrogen truck company either.
--:-- Ben Foldy: His first was an alarm business, like home alarms.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And then he started a company that was like an online marketplace in classified ads not dissimilar to Craigslist or eBay
--:-- Ben Foldy: And then at the same time he had this effort to get semi running on natural gas and that where he started kind of breaking into that world
--:-- Ben Foldy: But he's not an engineer, he's not, you know, a programmer, he's not a hydrogen scientist, he's not any of those things.
--:-- Ben Foldy: What he is, is a very good salesman.
--:-- Ben Foldy: This truck is by far the most state-of-the-art truck ever built in history.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Part of it is his background as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Often part of the LDS experience is doing mission.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Those type of mission trips end up making very, very good salespeople.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And so there's all these businesses around Utah that kind of try to take in the former missionaries because they're used to rejection.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And as one of my sources in Utah put it, if you can sell God, you can sell anything.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And so what does he do? What does he sell the world?
--:-- Ben Foldy: He did it sometimes through brazen and ambitious misrepresentations.
--:-- Ben Foldy: The first time that he shows a Nikola truck to the world, he says it's fully functioning.
--:-- Ben Foldy: He says it's chained off so that nobody can get in and drive it into the crowd.
--:-- Ben Foldy: It's a little expensive, okay? You could probably buy a jet with what it costs to build this thing.
--:-- Ben Foldy: So we're going to try to keep people from driving off.
--:-- Ben Foldy: But this thing fully functions and works, which is really incredible.
--:-- Ben Foldy: You know, this wasn't known at the time, but it came out later.
--:-- Ben Foldy: That truck could never drive.
--:-- Ben Foldy: It wasn't finished.
--:-- Ben Foldy: You know, it had hydrogen painted on its side, but had no hydrogen parts.
--:-- Ben Foldy: There was no hydrogen fuel cell in it.
--:-- Ben Foldy: So these like really core critical systems of the truck were not done.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Over a year later when Nikola, the company, put out this video of the truck driving, the tweet said the Nikola one in motion.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And it turns out that what they did was tow it to the top of a hill and let it roll down and use, you know, angles and drone shots to make it look as if it's driving at high speed.
--:-- Ben Foldy: The most state-of-the-art truck ever built in history.
--:-- Ben Foldy: So, you know, I would say the salesmanship ran ahead of the fact, but the fact was always kind of running along behind it trying to keep up.
--:-- Ben Foldy: But then, you know, it kind of spins a little bit out of control.
--:-- Ben Foldy: The company signs a deal to go public in the first half of 2020.
--:-- Ben Foldy: You know, it hasn't sold a truck.
--:-- Ben Foldy: It doesn't have a truck to sell yet.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Says it has billions of dollars in pre-orders, but none of them are binding.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And Trevor takes to social media to talk about the company a lot.
--:-- Ben Foldy: It's so fun to be able to change the world, get rid of emissions, and actually build a truck that can outperform a gasoline version because you can't force people into electrification.
--:-- Ben Foldy: You need to build better products that are actually better than the gas versions.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And that's what we've done with the Nikola Badger.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And the things that he starts saying about the company are less and less tethered to the core business of Nikola.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And one of the things that Nikola starts focusing on is a pickup truck called the Badger because Tesla came out and showed off the Cybertruck and people thought it was ugly and people responded well when Trevor tweeted about what it could look like.
--:-- Ben Foldy: One of the coolest things is you can literally drink the water right out of it.
--:-- Ben Foldy: So what we do is from all the hydrogen that comes out of the vehicle, the byproduct is just water.
--:-- Ben Foldy: We take that water, we clean it, we put it into the windshield washer fluid.
--:-- Ben Foldy: All the excess is cleaned and sent to a chiller so you can have ice cold clean water as you're driving down the road.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And Nikola's stock goes ballistic.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Nikola, that stock is up since, look at that, 88% since going public just last week.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Now that is a rally and a half.
--:-- Ben Foldy: At its peak, the stock price was so high that it made the company more valuable than Ford and Fiat.
--:-- Ben Foldy: It was this real moment of like, what is this company that hasn't sold anything, doesn't have any revenue, hasn't started manufacturing anything, and why is it worth more than Ford, which sells millions and millions of cars a year?
--:-- Ben Foldy: It's almost like an Icarus moment where Nikola announces that it has a deal with General Motors, the biggest automaker in America, to make the Badger.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And then two days later, a report by a short-selling firm called Hindenburg Research comes out.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Nikola shares are tumbling after a short-seller called the company, quote, an intricate fraud built on dozens of lies.
--:-- Ben Foldy: You know, they ran the gamut from the stuff about the truck reveal back in 2016 to Trevor Milton saying that the Nikola headquarters was covered in solar panels.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And they, you know, look on Google Earth and they say, no, it is not.
--:-- Ben Foldy: So, you know, it's this range of misrepresentations that they publish.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And within a couple of days, you know, it was reported that the SEC was looking into them.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And then it was quickly reported that the Department of Justice was looking into them.
--:-- Ben Foldy: So it seemed like there was really some smoke here from a regulatory perspective.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And then there started being issues with the underlying business.
--:-- Ben Foldy: GM pulled back from its deal.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And then about a week or so after the report came out, Trevor Milton stepped down as the executive chairman of Nikola.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Which again was kind of this like, oh, OK, something happened here, right?
--:-- Ben Foldy: Like people don't just step down from the company that they built if there's nothing to the allegations.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And then it turned out to be, you know, a pretty serious criminal investigation into Trevor Milton.
--:-- Ben Foldy: The founder and former executive chair of Nikola is now on trial in New York.
--:-- Ben Foldy: He's charged with lying about the company's products to mislead investors and prop up the stock.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Trevor pleaded not guilty and hired quite a powerful defense team to represent him.
--:-- Ben Foldy: That included Brad Bondi, who has previously represented Elon Musk in some of his securities litigation.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And he also had Mark Mukasey, who represented former President Donald Trump, as well as Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL, who was acquitted of war crimes.
--:-- Ben Foldy: So Trevor pleads not guilty, hires a big old fancy legal team.
--:-- Ben Foldy: What do they say he was up to when he lied about solar panels on the roof of his factory and rolled a truck down a hill?
--:-- Ben Foldy: Yeah, so they didn't touch the solar panels.
--:-- Ben Foldy: It was an interesting defense in some ways.
--:-- Ben Foldy: The argument about rolling the truck down the hill and showing off the truck and, you know, the truck without the fuel cell in it was actually that it was irrelevant.
--:-- Ben Foldy: You know, it was before Nikola was a publicly traded company.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Nobody bought and sold stock four years prior based on this, you know, event or these videos.
--:-- Ben Foldy: You know, and then the other defense was really that Trevor was talking about the business plan.
--:-- Ben Foldy: They actually made the argument in closing that this was a case of somebody being prosecuted for not being careful about what tense they were speaking in you know and saying things in present tense that you know where have maybe been in future tense
--:-- Ben Foldy: And how does that go for them?
--:-- Ben Foldy: Did not ultimately sway the jury.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Trevor was convicted of one of the counts of securities fraud and acquitted of the other and then was convicted on both counts of wire fraud.
--:-- Ben Foldy: The company has cut all ties with Milton, but the damage is done.
--:-- Ben Foldy: After reaching that high of more than $80 a share back in June, Nicola's shares closed at $3 and change on Friday.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Milton now facing a sentence of more than 20 years in prison.
--:-- Ben Foldy: I think Nicola tells us this is not easy.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Making cars and making trucks has never been easy.
--:-- Ben Foldy: It's an incredibly expensive endeavor and proposition.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And the seductiveness of these new startups that, you know, were scrappy and lean and had unconventional backgrounds of founders and things like that, they were not able to emulate Tesla in the ways that mattered or have not yet been.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And Tesla's success is pretty idiosyncratic and not easily emulated.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And I think that's one of the big lessons here.
--:-- Ben Foldy: And I think the other thing, too, is that all of those legacy companies, those older companies, they've caught up.
--:-- Ben Foldy: They're spending billions and billions and billions of dollars on EVs.
--:-- Ben Foldy: Ben Foldy, Wall Street Journal.
--:-- Ben Foldy: He's got a whole dang podcast about Trevor Milton and Nikola. It's called Bad Bets.
--:-- Ben Foldy: It's season two of that show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You might not ever get rich.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for today's show comes from Adio.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What is Adio?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up, And within seconds, you will have your email and calendars synced.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You'll see all your relationships in a fully-fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes so that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can go to addio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash todayexplained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from Macy's.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's almost fall, and that means it's time to cycle your wardrobe to the cold setting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because while everyone loves a breezy summer outfit, let's be real, layering is even more fun.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's why Macy's Fall Fashion Guide has everything you need to piece together the perfect look for you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's your one-stop shop for fall's latest trends and must-haves, curated by their experts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Add a statement shoe to your collection, like the calf-hair loafers from Steve Madden.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Or tap into your romantic side with flowy dresses from Cece and sheer pieces from INC.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can even throw in some textural layers for contrast, like a faux fur bomber jacket from Karl Lagerfeld Paris.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Whether your old favorite sweater or coat is on its last threads, or you're just craving a new vibe to switch things up, Macy's has got you covered this season.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Find the perfect layering pieces for you by exploring the Macy's Fall Fashion Style Guide.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Shop in-store or online at Macy's.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You're familiar with the phrase, man's reach exceeds his grasp.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a lie.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Man's grasp exceeds his nerve.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained, we're back.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We just spoke to Ben about the hijinks at Nikola, but we wanted to get a lay of the land in the EV world at large.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we got in touch with Rebecca Highwell from Recode.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: Rebecca, how's this big push to electrify going?
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: It's going well, but it's still pretty early right now.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: You know, only four to five percent of the vehicles that are being produced or sold in the United States are electric vehicles.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: That means the vast majority are still those classic gas-powered internal combustion vehicles.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: You know, the main challenge is that we have a technology that works, the battery electric vehicle, but just because it works doesn't mean that it's super easy to manufacture, you know, hundreds of thousands and millions of these vehicles and make them mainstream.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: Right.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: And Nikola was taking this hydrogen fuel cell approach, but that isn't the approach the majority of manufacturers are making, right?
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: Yeah, so hydrogen fuel cell technology, people have been talking about it for a while.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: I actually just bought a vintage sci-fi magazine that was talking about hydrogen fuel tech.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: So people have been talking about it for a while, but it has really struggled to get off the ground.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: You know, the vast majority of the electric vehicles that we're seeing in the United States are battery electric vehicles.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: So those are certainly easier to sort of get rolling than hydrogen fuel cell cars, But they definitely have their own manufacturing challenges, too.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: And that really all goes back to the battery.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: These batteries require really rare materials or hard-to-produce materials that aren't necessarily so plentiful that will have enough to produce all the electric vehicles that car companies want to build.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: And a lot of these materials need to be extracted or mined.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: This is not a clean process in any way.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: You know, the argument is that it's still better to pursue EVs.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: But, you know, there are real opponents, especially people who live near some of these facilities, you know, which probably have a lot to say about the environmental impacts that these kind of operations have.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: So there are real tradeoffs that need to be considered.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: We've talked about some of these materials on the show before, like cobalt.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: Cobalt is at the moment key for batteries.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: It stops them overheating and allows smaller battery sizes to be made.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: Yeah so the chemistry that batteries require can vary a little bit but there are some materials that it just very clear that batteries are going to need a lot of
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: So there cobalt like you mentioned which almost entirely comes from the DRC where there are massive concerns about human rights abuses and child labor
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: So that raises some really important challenges that need to be addressed for getting EVs off the ground.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: There's lithium.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: And right now, lithium primarily comes from a place called the Lithium Triangle in South America and in some cases, Australia.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: There's nickel, which Russia produces a lot of.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: So that's obviously a challenge for obvious geopolitical reasons and the war in Ukraine.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: But just adding a second layer of complexity to this is the fact that a lot of these materials need to be refined.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: And a lot of that refining currently takes place in China.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: China controls 80 percent of the world's raw material refining, more than three quarters of global cell capacity, and 60 percent of the planet's component manufacturing.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: That means realizing President Biden's transportation future of electric cars would depend on China unless the U.S. develops its own capacity.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: And there's a ton of competition for these resources, right?
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: There's a ton of competition.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: You know, the United States wants to resurrect its legacy as this big auto manufacturing nation.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: You know, you think of like Motor City and all the big automakers there.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: But, you know, a lot of countries and a lot of companies around the world sense a major opportunity with EVs and everyone wants to get in on being able to extract these materials, sell these materials and control the global electric vehicle market.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: And as we've covered on the show before, President Biden is trying to put his foot on the pedal a little bit.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: A lot of bit.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: American manufacturing is back.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: Detroit is back.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: America's back.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: And folks, we're proving it's never, ever, ever a good bet to bet against the American people.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: Never, never, never.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: Yeah, he's putting billions and billions and billions of dollars.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: So the first way the Biden administration is sort of trying to get EVs off the ground is by investing in that American supply chain for electric vehicles.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: So that means, you know, subsidizing battery manufacturing, trying to help do some of that work with rare materials here in the United States.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: I believe we can own the future of the automobile market.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: I believe we can own the future of manufacturing.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: But it also means trying to convince people to actually buy electric vehicles.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: So we're spending billions of dollars to build a nationwide network of EV chargers.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: And the hope there is that there are charges everywhere.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: People won't feel so nervous about transitioning to electric vehicles.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: It used to be that to buy an electric car, you had to make all sorts of compromises.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: But not now.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: So really a lot of money is going into this right now.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: And some of this investment has been controversial, right?
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: People ask, why not invest this money in other green initiatives instead of giving auto manufacturers a leg up and subsidizing cars that a lot of people still can't afford?
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: Yeah, there is definitely a major debate about how, you know, the U.S. should be approaching the electrification of transportation.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: I think the Biden administration would say, you know, we are spending money on electrifying not just, you know, passenger cars, the kind of cars that a family might own, but also vehicles that are used by the government.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: There are many tens and thousands and hundreds of thousands of vehicles used by the federal government.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: They're also, you know, subsidizing the electrification of school buses and things like that.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: But there is real debate to be had.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: And, you know, some people say like, yeah, of course we should be using electric vehicles, but maybe it's better to focus on like electric public transportation and that should be the priority.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: So I think in reality, it's kind of going to be a mix of everything.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: But this effort doesn't lack criticism.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: There are definitely criticisms that have been made about how we're going about funding this and whether, you know, who should be benefiting from all this money.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: Well, I guess if it's happening anyway, one can at least just hope that it'll be successful.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: Do these measures Biden has introduced, these massive spending efforts, go far enough to address the supply issues that you talked about earlier?
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: So one of the things to note here is that these companies have committed to make, you know, transitioning away from internal combustion vehicles or even just stop selling them entirely.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: General Motors has committed to not doing that.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: And, you know, the trend seems to be there.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: I think the question is like whether it's going to happen fast enough.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: And every gas car that's sold is maybe a car that could have been an EV.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: So and that car is going to exist for quite a long time, continuing to emit.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: So it's not just, you know, whether it's going to happen.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: It's when when this will happen.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: It'll happen fast enough to, you know, deal with the massive climate crisis facing the world right now.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: Even though it feels like this is the way the world is heading and it's sort of, you know, unavoidable, you still see a majority of gas-powered vehicles on the road.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: And electric cars are still out of reach for a lot of consumers.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: But, you know, California passed this law saying that they were banning the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: How inevitable is the, you know, American vehicle fleet being all electric?
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: I think the future of the car at this point is electric.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: That's not to say that there won't necessarily be gas-powered cars in the future, but, you know, California is the biggest car market in the country.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: And I think that sort of hints at what's to come.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: Again, that matches the same date that GM has set to get rid of selling, you know, its own gas-powered vehicles.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: So that's sort of the future that we're headed to.
--:-- Rebecca Highwell: And that means taking the promise and also the downsides to the manufacturing of EVs really seriously.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That was Rebecca Highwell. She's a reporter with Recode.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can read her work at Vox.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our program today was produced by Amanda Llewellyn.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was edited by Matthew Collette.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Fact-checked by Laura Bullard, with help from Miles Bryan, Halima Shah, and in one case, Paul Robert Mounsey.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You've been listening to Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
