Making America Great Again

— in the electric vehicle arena

I suspect I’m like a lot of people at my age where it seems like every third news article inspires me to make a note to “write a blog about the thing that reminds me of.” Current potential blog count 2353. Current actual blog count 23. Channeling my inner Samuel Clemens, I’m inspired to regale at every turn.

However, these last two weeks several intersectional and significant events personal, current and newsworthy inspired me from intention to action.

Many dear readers will know me as a serial entrepreneur. Some may know me as an investor. But you may not know I spent some time in the film and television business, producing 17+ TV and film projects, including a few Emmy award winners and the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” which won a WGA, was nominated for basically every documentary film award ever!

I led to the sale of the film to Sony Pictures — exec producing the film alongside my ex-wife and the mother of my oldest two children, Tavin, my college friend, Jessie — and collaborating with my longtime, enemy, rival and former digital agency competitor and now friend — the film’s director Chris Paine. It was the creation of this film and my failure to procure the film’s original subject, the General Motor’s EV1, that launched a lifelong passion around electric vehicles, the grid, and energy in general, alongside my deep abiding focus on sustainability and the environment.

First item; my portfolio company (and ARK client) Electron raised its latest venture funding round. Founded and led by my friend and company founder, Joanna Hubbard, they managed to make it through Crypto Winter and raise a reasonable round of financing. This round enabled Electron to continue their market-by-market progress (UK + multiple national markets). Electron is a London-based energy tech company that uses blockchain technology to power and deploy distributed energy trading platforms. They partner with leading regional players to ensure demand, and regulators to ensure compliance. But what they ultimately enable is free market energy trading, which drives consumption and generation along the correct directions using (yes, you guessed it) economic incentives. No socialism here though — this is pure, unadulterated free market capitalism. I wish I had more capital to invest in the company. It’s a fantastic business, and I’m pleased to be a small participant.

Second, but not insignificantly, gasoline prices here in California are again approaching $4 a gallon — a price last seen as we were producing the previously mentioned documentary (and the footage of the gas signs was removed at legal demand from the release version of the film after a cease and desist from not one but several oil companies!)

Oh yes, I was also banned for life from the Peterson Automotive Museum, but that’s a totally separate story…

Most recently I saw a news article last week indicating that 58.4 percent of new cars sold in Norway in March were battery-powered, calling this “historically high.” Compare this to California, where electric vehicles hover around 5 percent of all cars sold. Across the U.S., that number is much lower; ~2.3% of the fleet.

Yes, you read that right. Norway, which is considerably colder than Michigan or Massachusetts, has more oil than the USA, and is one of my daughter’s (and possibly my own) ancestors’ birthplaces, has bought more electric cars than fossil fuel. This, where a RANGE ROVER is actually a defensible purchase, vs. San Francisco where @Vaportalk (my lover and baby-mama) just got her Discovery and uses it to run to the store for diapers for Valentine Barlow Simon Titus (@lifewithvalentine on Instagram — by the way — I’m @RD_Titus) and have the lowest number of followers in the entire family — so show some love, eh?) BTW for those of you prepping particularly nasty comments about our ownership of such a gas guzzling polluting car the Titus-Gad family is leveraging the same approach that Fiat/Chrysler & Tesla just announced; Incentives indeed! No collusion!

Twelve years ago when my partners and I produced the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” I remember feeling the same sense of wonder and despair at the state of the battle of Electric vs. Combustion Vehicles as I do now.

Tesla #1 (VP0019 for nerds)

Back then, electric vehicles were small, lame, short-distanced things that failed to achieve the “cool” factor any post-marriage, pre-fatherhood young man felt necessary. I remember test driving a silver TESLA roadster Validation prototype (one I secretly believe I later owned and still have a share of now that it’s safer in my friend VC Paul’s safe garage/hands). Now it’s all about adoption and — sadly — public opinion and optics.

The same week as all of the above events was another momentous occasion: I took delivery of my third Tesla Model S. This one a murdered out P100D, I’ve named her BLACK MAGIK too.

Jay-Z’s Model S

Electric cars are definitely S-3-X-Y.

Black Magik Too

BTW Jay Z and I have the same taste!

Yes, I keep buying Teslas. Do I do it because I’m “the electric car guy”? Well, that’s likely why I bought the first one. Do I do it to keep my “green” credentials? Well, there are far cheaper options than dropping $100k — and some other great electric cars in the mix these days. The truth is, I bought or really leased, this third Tesla because it’s a great fucking car. It’s fast, it’s beautiful, it’s reliable, and it’s cost-efficient. My in-car navigation and A/V system trumps Ms. @Vaportalk’s Land Rover, which will barely connect to our iPhones (or even the Titus girls’ Pixels). It has front and rear seat heaters for those cold California mornings of ~54 degrees. It has a nifty feature that automatically raises and lowers the suspension based on location (and automatically remembers) so that I never scrape my car on the hills, valleys, and potholes of San Francisco’s streets.

Moreover, It regularly updates, giving me new features around every other month. This time, it was enhancements to the autopilot, sentry mode (where the car’s cameras film people when they door ding it ) and “Dog mode” which sets the interior temp at a safe/fixed temp ) driving and automatically opening my garage door. Previous updates made the sound system, ahem, better.

The maintenance costs of my three Teslas was virtually zero; so low that the occasional set of brake pads (Roadster) or tires (Tesla snow & not) felt like a major inconvenience. By comparison, @vaportalk’s Audi was in the shop every two months for some stupid thing or another — and NEVER got autopilot, much less improved self-driving over the air.

Tesla is an American car, made in America (actually right here in the Bay Area) by American workers. It is built on American technology, much of which was initially developed by GM and a cohort of amazing startups in which I WISH I’d invested. The first commercial electric vehicles were American cars. GM even created and shipped the EV1, which starred in my film mentioned above, and was the first commercial modern electric vehicle; And yet, Norway is kicking America’s collective butt, and China is pumping out electric vehicles at a rate of 3:1 to our fossil fuel cars. Why is this?

Don’t lecture me on Norway’s abundant hydro. Norway has more oil than the USA. Don’t lecture me about “small cars and cold houses” (yes, that’s a quote from my film). Norwegians drive just as many Range Rovers as we do in the US, it’s just that many of their OTHER cars are electric. and do NOT tell me, “Electric cars don’t work here in the cold/distances/physics/spaces.” ALL OF THIS IS NONSENSE. Norway is a far harsher environment and with less charging infrastructure.

The issue is a matter of knowledge, commitment, and action.

In America, we have ignorance, disinformation, and apathy — which tie directly into why we haven’t fully progressed towards adopting electric vehicles.

But let’s step out of our American superiority fake news bubble for a minute and pretend to take a rational look at **Norway** as an example of how knowledge, commitment, action, and incentives can drive positive change.

Lets deep diver on how and why Norway has achieved such progress so quickly and effectively:

1. Socialism, Infrastructure, and Grid Elasticity

First, Norway is a democratic socialist nation. They have a phenomenal electric grid built and maintained by the government, not a free market. Did this grid raise taxes in Norway? No, it actually lowered them while reducing pollution and improving the overall quality of life.

Compare this to the situation in California, where there’s an 80 percent shift in demand between peak times (about 4 pm), and non-peak times (about 3 am). Most grids, particularly in the US where fossil fuels are the norm, have minimal gaps in energy production between their peak and valley (that’s the maximum and minimum energy they create). You can’t just turn off an oil or coal power plant every day for 12 hours! That means the delta between them is ~20 percent, so there’s a massive chunk of energy wasted daily. This is one reason that electric vehicles (including Teslas) are so interesting — they help balance power utilization by consuming what is largely — Waste Energy.

If you’re like me, you charge your car — overnight. From a fossil fuel standpoint, even if your power comes from 100 percent dirty coal, the net cost is zero. That’s because the power was going to be created regardless, and burned in the form of steam at a local power plant. (This happens to be the reason my favorite body surf spots in Huntington Beach and San Onofre are so warm — wasted energy and production elasticity issues) Projects like Electron are hoping to improve this situation over time as they deploy — but also electric fleets and powerwalls and yes — Smart grids and smart cities all help us be more efficient with the energy we already create as well as the energy we need to expand our production to service.

2. Stopping the Spread of Misinformation

Norway has free education. Even college. For everyone. Yes, everyone. My friend emigrated to Norway and went to college for free there. Anyone can do it. He’s still there and even got married to a lovely Norwegian girl. While this factor may not have directly prompted Norwegians to adopt electric vehicles, it does make them less susceptible to misinformation spread on Facebook and the like. In fact, after watching the chaos of the fake news in elections in the UK and US, Norway (gulp) acted. They make sure their citizens are equipped to do their own research and make their own decisions.

The LEAF, not the TESLA is the best selling car in Norway. (Though I suspect with Tesla’s mode 3 & Y that will change, #fingers crossed)

S-3-X-Y indeed.

3. It All Comes Back to Incentives

In Norway, the government committed to migrate its fleet to electric. This meant tax subsidies. They don’t have a domestic car industry, but they focused on incentives.

These aren’t handouts to Elon Musk or Ford (makers of the VOLT). Instead, they are precisely what they are named: Incentives. They lean on the scales to move consumer behavior in a direction that benefits everyone. That’s the focus of socialism.

Did this bankrupt the Norwegian economy? No, the additional consumption and ecosystem development for charging, maintenance, etc. in addition to the higher taxes, fees, and income streams from heavier polluting vehicles and drivers, was a net positive to the GDP.

Will this stop global warming? Sadly, no. But Norway serves as a lesson to everyone that it’s possible to enact change, so maybe in some small way, this helps lead the way for the world. It’s a bit like how I felt when we made the film. It wasn’t a big thing, but it was something I could do; And it moved us, just a little bit, in the right direction.

Norway’s EV success is the result of their use of both the carrot and the stick. It offers incredibly generous incentives to EV buyers, and it punishes people who continue to use gas or diesel cars. Capital city Oslo has made extraordinary efforts to promote EVs, including toll-free roads, HOV-lane access, free parking, and free charging. Imagine what this would look like in the United States: Incentive-based programs for electric vehicle ownership, and infrastructure improvements that benefit everyone. What will it take for us to move/leap/look in the right direction? I can’t figure it out because rather than increasing incentives on purchasing the most innovative American Car on teh road — Instead, today we see our state and federal legislators cutting tax credits when they should be expanding them.

As JFK once said, “They threw their hats over the wall” and then they had to figure out a way to get them back. So instead of the Pence Space Force, we should focus on Americans’ ingenuity, capital, young people, and passion towards a better future for all of us.

The Norwegian government committed. and then they delivered.

The question I ask myself every single day is:

What are you going to do to change the world?

Speaking of which…

If I managed to retain your attention to this point, leave a comment describing how this story made a difference for you, and what other topics you’d like to hear about from me…

Richard D. Titus (aka Titus) is a technology executive, serial entrepreneur, raconteur and sometime musician and filmmaker. If this after reading this massive thing you want to hear more from me you can follow me on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook or connect with me on Linkedin.