Review of a Bloomberg Businessweek TALKS event: How Electric Cars Will Drive The Future

In 2017, Bloomberg Businessweek went behind the paywall. You now need a Bloomberg All Access subscription. So I bought one. Companies talk about conferences, meet-ups, and events, but does anyone ever attend? I actually did. Here’s what happened.

Last month, after reaching my 30-minute limit for Bloomberg Live TV, I was prompted to maintain access through one of two available subscription.

There, I noticed that All Access also includes the following:

• Monthly, subscriber-only conference calls
• Access exclusive, in-person events backed by Bloomberg’s newsroom and powerful data
• Live streaming of Bloomberg events across the globe

That caught my attention. My first thought was that I wouldn’t only have access to content, I would have access more directly to people. So I reached out to my network on LinkedIn to see if anyone had experience attending any of these calls or events.

500 views and two weeks later with no reply. The majority of my network is composed of those working in banking, finance, and private equity. I’m connected with multiple Bloomberg contributors. Should I have included their names in the post? Did I not use enough hashtags? Does anyone even have a subscription?

These were all questions I asked before conveniently receiving the following email:

JOIN US!

Bloomberg Businessweek assistant managing editor James E. Ellis and Bloomberg New Energy Finance advanced transport analyst Salim Morsy will be live in a few minutes for this month’s webcast, How Electric Cars Will Drive the Future.

WHAT WE’LL DISCUSS

Personal mobility is undergoing a change not seen since the horse was replaced by the internal combustion engine a century ago. At the forefront of this revolution is the shift toward electric vehicles. In 2017, 1 million plug-in electric vehicles were sold, a tenfold increase in just five years. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that by 2040 over half of all new cars sold globally will be electric. James and Salim will discuss the drivers behind electric vehicle adoption, the outlook for the car industry, and how our relationship to personal transportation will change over the coming decades.

WE’RE TAKING QUESTIONS

We look forward to answering your questions. There’s a Questions window on the right side of your webcast console. Please send them over as we’re talking, and keep them coming!

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If no one else had experienced it, I would.

With a readied calendar alert I waited in anticipation to experience the subscription’s promise.

The moment arrived. I signed in to the webcast, submitted my own question, watched as James (Jim) E. Ellis and Salim Morsy (@SalimMorsy) introduce the event, and listened.

And… It was actually informative. There are “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.” Discussions like this confront both. I was reminded, for example, that Chinese markets are spoken of in the same breath as technology advancements. I also learned that Tesla globally only sells about 10% of electric vehicles, and that Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway owns 10% of a Chinese competitor, BYD. These were not questions I had thought to ask; nonetheless, they were answered, and in a fractionally small but not immaterial way, my grasp of the shape of the global economy grew.

Following the presentation, Jim posed questions submitted by viewers to Salim. Lo and behold, the question I submitted was the first given:

Different ratios of minerals and metals are required to create components for electric cars compared to traditional vehicles. This is more recently apparent for cobalt, copper, and lithium mining. How will growing electric car production, therefore, most readily shape the global economy, especially with regard to mining in emerging markets?

I considered the question by combining insights from multiple sources: from learning about the current state of cobalt mining in Africa from The China in Africa Podcast by Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden, from hearing about changes in the ratio of metals and minerals used in EVs compared to combustion vehicles from S&P Global Platts’ Commodities Spotlight Podcast, from reading a Bloomberg article on the increasing need of Lithium especially with respect Tesla Motors’ batteries, and from reading about infrastructure and supply chain developments in emerging markets in general from books like China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know by Arthur R. Kroeber.

I don’t have the transcript of Salim’s response because I was attempting to type it all down as he spoke, so here is the paraphrased on-air response to my question:

This has been the biggest talk in the financial community. If a lot of electric vehicles are going to be sold, more of these materials will be required. But reserves of these metals currently exist. The bottlenecks are in processing them and the geopolitical risk in mining, especially with cobalt concentrated in Congo. These are built into current pricing, though there may be a gap of a few years before supply matches demand.

Out of all the sources I had read or listened to, here was a reply that both confirmed the significance of changes in material needs for the growing number of electric vehicles being developed, as well as a reply with further insight that specifically identified a factor that is on track to affect the entire EV industry.

While the talk was informative, having access to industry experts via the ability to submit questions for on-air responses was my favorite part of this month’s Bloomberg Businessweek TALK. This is what I hoped for in the subscription: to have closer access to people. For this event, it was a thorough success. The All Access subscription additionally entitles me to Bloomberg Live. I still have no idea what they will be like, but I look forward to attending. If you have had any experience with one of these events, do share in the comments.

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Johann Lilly serves as Technology Director for Woolf: Building the First University.