We’re not dedicated to a schedule or structure for “DOJc blogtime.” There’s been an unusual lag since last posts. We’ve been absorbed with clients, and working with Dr. Z. Justin Ren of Boston University’s Questrom School of Business finishing a book on the transition to electric vehicles.
The book is titled Transition Road: Why the Electric Car Already Won, and Still Feels Stuck. The authors argue — the electric car is the better machine, and most people who try one never go back. Yet the switch keeps stalling. Governments have moved their deadlines and automakers have scaled back their pledges. Drivers still pull up to chargers that are broken or already taken. The car was never the hard part. Moving a billion and a half vehicles off gasoline means untangling automakers, oil companies, and electric utilities, industries that answer to different regulators and investors and have grown into each other over a century. Nobody is in charge of the handoff between them; and the charger, the place where the new system meets the road, belongs to no one in particular. The authors trace where investment goes, why commercial fleets will electrify first, what China's battery swapping networks reveal, and what new institutions could do to finally make charging dependable. Written for the general reader as a sequel to Melting the ICE, Transition Road maps where the electric vehicle transition stands and what should happen next.