How a connected car could easily become an expensive paperweight

Europe keeps announcing “battery partnerships” with Asian players with great enthusiasm — but when you look closely, the only thing landing here in any meaningful quantity is concrete. A T&E/Carbone4 report, which came out this February and which I’ve missed, lays out what many of us working in manufacturing have suspected for years: technology isn’t coming, know-how isn’t coming, and the only thing being localised is the assembly hall.

Here is my 4-step FOAK Strategy Checklist

Construction sites and factory floors are places I’m far more used to than a laboratory. But last week I was in the Netherlands, meeting a client and visiting two universities to see how their new chemical product is getting ready for its demo project. And I have to say: I haven’t yet seen this level of preparation — on both the R&D and project sides. Every assumption challenged, every risk logged, every experiment linked to a downstream engineering decision. It’s the sort of

Robotaxis still don’t make money — not in San Francisco, not in Shenzhen. Yet both the US and China keep pushing, each for their own reasons. I dug into two Economist articles this week and wrote a breakdown of why both countries are accelerating into a business model that still has its unit economics stuck in reverse.

Mega-corporations rarely die from a single dramatic mistake. They fade through a sequence of small decisions that felt “pragmatic” at the time.

Nothing tests a founder’s sanity like having too many “very interested” customers. It’s like speed dating with homework. A few days ago, I spoke with an early-stage founder whose product was attracting a lot of interest. On paper, it looked like a dream: inbound requests from consumer electronics, defence, industrial automation, and even a few overseas corporates. In reality, it was a trap. The team had five people, no sales function, and most of their time was devoted to dev

Why VCs might be dangerous to FOAK projects and 5 steps to get VC money safely.

Why Tesla Pivots to Korea from China?

Why AI power demand won't materialise at the scale imagined.

Why touchscreens are not the key strength of the Chinese car industry.

Your FOAK supply chain doesn’t start when you place the first order — it starts when you design your pilot. Miss that moment, and delays, overruns, and “unavailable parts” will follow. In my new post, I go through five steps to build your supply chain before your FOAK becomes real.

Adaptation and mitigation are often viewed as competing for capital. In fact, they are not.

Takeaways from FOAK panel at VDS 2025

We need more capital to bridge the FOAK “valley of death” in climate tech — but not at any cost. Lately, I’ve seen two worrying ideas gaining ground: crowdfunding that asks ordinary people to “invest like VCs,” and proposals to channel pension money into the riskiest stage of startup growth. Both sound democratic. Both are dangerous.

The military has always been the earliest adopter of new tech. Dirk Singer noted that today it’s also one of the biggest investors in e-fuels — not for climate goals, but for energy security. Like solar panels in the 1990s, disruption often starts on the battlefield.

I spoke with a European founder developing his own battery cells. Just getting permits for the mixing and coating stages pushed his project back by three years. Those two stages alone would make up over 60% of total capex. That’s why building dedicated electrode toll-manufacturing foundries for scaleups makes so much sense — they can shortcut years of permitting and tens of millions in investment. At higher volumes, though, around 5–8 GWh, it flips. The economics start favour

Airbus showed Europe can beat giants like Boeing through distributed collaboration. Could batteries follow the same path—moving from vertically integrated gigafactories to networks of “partners in success”?

I stumbled across Martin Gallardo’s post and decided that it would be worthwhile to rewrite my comment into a full post. The consulting business has never been so good, but with the advent of AI, people were predicting that it would soon go out of business. I believe that these comments are made by people who either had a very negative experience hiring consultants (I had that experience, too) or have no idea what they are talking about. I’ve seen three very different ways

This was my second Battery Day in the Netherlands. Last year I came for the first time and was surprised at how much battery innovation is happening here. This year the event was bigger, much better organised, and had over 600 participants. It also gained an international dimension — with Matthieu Hubert from ACC giving a keynote on the French sector, and a dedicated session on cooperation with China. A few takeaways: 1) Scaling Dutch startups means going international. The g