PAGE
7
porsche taycan
300+ mile r ange
pricing tba
audi e-tron
204 mile r ange
(EPA)
base price
$74 ,800
19
FORTUNE.COM // MAY.1.19
THE Y MISSED
ON LYF T
(AND OTHERS)
EVEN THE MOST
SAV V Y INVESTORS
HAVE WHIFFED
ON LUCR ATIVE
OPPORTUNITIES.
INVESTING
GOING ELECTRIC
John Borthwick
Betaworks
“I got an introduction
to [Snapchat’s] Evan
Spiegel ... and didn’t
take the meeting
because what I saw
was a sexting app.
Shortsighted. I sus-
pect if I had met him,
I would have realized
it wasn’t that.”
mark suster
Upfront Ventures
“I didn’t understand
why helping people
share rides from
Palo Alto to SF was
a big idea. I was very
wrong.”
kal vepuri
Brainchild Holdings
“Spent half a day at
Pinterest’s condo/
office and had a few
follow-up discus-
sions. I won’t make
that mistake again.
I ended up participat-
ing later at (much)
higher valuations.”
Neue Batterien
The German government has made a big bet
on batteries. But is the investment in the right
place? By David Meyer
THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY is
vital to the German economy,
and cars are going electric. So, the thinking goes,
Europe—and Germany in particular—should be
making more electric car batteries.
It’s certainly a booming industry; electric car bat-
tery sales are projected to hit $60 billion by 2030.
But the companies making the batteries are over-
whelmingly Chinese—fostered by state subsidies for
electric-car makers and predicted to take 70% of the
market. There are also big Japanese and South Ko-
rean players, such as Panasonic (Tesla and Toyota’s
battery partner), LG Chem, and Samsung SDI.
Germany wants some of that action. In Novem-
ber, the government announced a 1 billion euro
($1.12 billion) fund for German companies to
develop and build battery cells. Germany’s National
Industrial Strategy 2030, unveiled in February,
fretted that “if the digital platform for autonomous
driving with artificial intelligence were to come from
the USA and the battery from Asia for the cars of the
future, Germany and Europe would lose over 50%
of value added in this area.” The solution? State as-
sistance for battery cell production.
But not everyone
is convinced this ap-
proach makes sense.
“It’s burning taxpay-
ers’ money,” says Fer-
dinand Dudenhöffer,
professor of auto-
motive economics
at the University of
Duisburg-Essen and
a veteran of car firms
such as Opel and
Porsche. “It’s stupid.
It’s crazy what our
ministry of econom-
ics is doing.”
According to
Dudenhöffer, the
government is looking
for value in the wrong
place. He suggests
European companies
forgo battery produc-
tion—ceding that
business to Asia—and
instead research new
materials that over-
come the limitations
of current lithium-ion
batteries like, for ex-
ample, cold-weather
performance.
“The value does not
exist in the manu-
facturing process in
which they want to
spend 1 billion euros,”
he says. “The value is
in the materials.”
CO
UR
TE
SY
OF
AU
DI^
AN
D^ P
OR
SC
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