There’s a new world’s fastest car.
It’s not a Ferrari, Lamborghini or Bugatti.
It’s Chinese brand BYD.
BYD’s new Yangwang U9 “hypercar” clocked 308 mph during testing in Germany, shattering the record formerly held by a Bugatti Chiron.
Yet there was no roaring piston engine, because the world’s new fastest car is… an electric vehicle (EV).
A fellow optimist Marc Andreessen had some interesting thoughts on this during a recent podcast.
“I just met one of the most successful guys in Dubai… This guy is extremely wealthy. He could drive anything. He told us he’s replaced his entire personal fleet with Chinese [electric] cars. Not because they’re cheaper, but because they’re better.”
For a century we burned stuff to make the world go round – petrol in engines, gas in stoves, oil in boilers. Now the burners are getting swapped for motors, batteries and electronics. And not just for environmental reasons. In most cases, electric stuff is just better now.
Not long ago, battery-powered cars were worse in almost every way: slower, pricier, shorter range.
It’s time to update our worldview. Because the fastest, safest, most desirable machines are now electric.
It’s not just cars. Your kitchen will soon be electrified too.
I visited Impulse Labs’ HQ and got a hands-on live demo of its battery-powered, outrageously fast stove. It’s radically better than anything in your kitchen today. I saw it boil a big pot of water in 40 seconds, versus 10 minutes for a conventional oven.
It reminded me of watching a Tesla CyberTruck, towing another CyberTruck, race past a Lamborghini. It’s the moment you realize the game has changed.
Impulse’s stove is powered by a lithium battery that delivers short bursts of massive power far beyond what a wall outlet alone can supply. The stove turns that energy into a perfectly controlled magnetic field that heats a pan directly, not the air around it. This keeps the glass-ceramic top cool to the touch so your kids don’t burn their hands.
And that, my friends, is all you need to build a stove that’s 10X better than anything else on the market.
Meanwhile, something strange happened in California last month.
Big gas power plants usually roar to life and take over from solar when the sun goes down.
But this time, thousands of white battery boxes woke up and shouldered the evening rush. They pushed out enough electricity to power millions of homes.
This network of batteries working together is called a virtual power plant (VPP). It’s thousands of Tesla Powerwall boxes hanging in garages, linked together by code. A signal goes out like a neighborhood group text, and those home batteries function as one big power plant.
On one recent evening, Tesla’s VPP dispatched roughly a mid-size gas plant’s worth of power to the grid.
The best part? Powerwall owners got paid.
The company that masters VPPs will be the biggest power provider in America within our lifetimes.
It’s a no-brainer for homeowners: lower bills and immunity from all but the worst blackouts. For the grid, it’s even better: access to backup energy when they’re in a pickle.
The magic of batteries is they move energy through time. They bottle up cheap daytime sunshine and pour it back out at dinnertime when it’s needed most.
Batteries are the engine of the electric leapfrog. Unlike oil and gas, batteries are technologies, not fuels. And what do rational optimists know about technology? It gets better, faster, and cheaper.
That’s why battery prices collapsed 99% since 1980 while performance tripled.
Ethan Loosbrock, founder of battery innovator Ouros Energy. He’s building a new cell that’s 10X denser and 100X cheaper than today’s lithium-ion batteries.
If Ouros can execute, it’ll be one of the biggest breakthroughs of our time. You can listen to our conversation here.
Electrification is the golden thread tying together many of today’s most important innovations.
Every industry built on burning things for fuel is up for reinvention.
Have you ever heard of a diesel-powered humanoid robot? No, and you never will.
And AI data centers are just vast warehouses that turn electricity into intelligence.
Take what my friend Casey Handmer is building with Terraform Industries. It’s taking advantage of rapidly falling solar prices to make natural gas from sunshine, water, and air.
If you’re an entrepreneur, ask yourself: what problem could you electrify? Sam D’Amico of Impulse built battery-powered stoves because he wanted to cook pizza faster.
You don’t have to be an inventor to seize this opportunity. The electrification boom needs installers, electricians and technicians.
Electrician wages for contractors working on data centers have roughly doubled over the past year. In the southern US, companies are building AI factories the size of Manhattan. If you’re willing to move to West Texas, it’s the 2015 fracking boom all over again.
I love these two Wall Street Journal headlines because they’re the opposite of the usual “tech kills jobs” spiel.
America Is Trying to Electrify. There Aren’t Enough Electricians.
And for America, it’s a wakeup call.
America was hooked on foreign oil for decades. We literally fought wars over it. Then came fracking, which turned the US from energy beggar into energy superpower.
Now the game has changed again. China is winning, hands down, in the electric leapfrog era. It’s the world’s first “electro-state” – the Saudi Arabia of electric tech.
China makes 80% of the world’s solar panels, 70% of EVs, and 75% of batteries… all at a lower cost than the West.
This is a more serious problem than it may seem. In the old industrial world, knowing how to make a car didn’t help you make a phone.
But in this new electric age, product know-how converges. EVs, drones, and flying cars are all versions of the same machine: a battery, a motor and a computer wrapped in a different shell.
BYD started as a humble battery maker, then realized a modern car is basically a battery, motor, and software platform on wheels. Master those three, and you can build anything that moves… even the world’s fastest car. Now BYD makes everything from buses and forklifts to ships and trains.
In the electrified economy, once you can build one thing well, you can build almost anything.
In a world built on electricity, he who controls the electrons controls the future… from AI data centers and robot fleets to desalination plants and air taxis.
The good news is American builders are putting us back in the game. Innovators like Neros, Base Power and Ouros are proving the US can still lead when we decide to build.
Great Quotes
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” – Groucho Marx,
Picture of the Week
Coyote Buttes, Arizona
All content is the opinion of Brian Decker
