China's Networked Mobility Revolution with Bill Russo

[Music] So, I'm going to have commotions fast forward podcast where we talk to leaders of the forefront of the mobility revolution. I'm Nick Prolov-Giles. I'm going to start here by painting a picture of two companies. One listeners are likely very familiar with, one they might not be, depending on where you're listening from. The first Volkswagen narrowly avoided closing three of its factories last year after facing mountain costs and slowing sales. They've recently announced production pauses at two of its plants, citing soft demand. The other BYD just announced that its sales in the EU have jumped to staggering 250% despite steep tariffs and market unfamiliarity. So how did this happen? To answer that and much more, we're joined today by Bill Russo, founder and CEO of Automobility, a strategy and investment advisory firm helping its clients to build and profit from the future of mobility. He has over 40 years of industry experience, which includes 15 as an automotive executive with Chrysler, which I'm sure we'll get into, and 22 years of experience in China and Asia. So, Bill, welcome to Fast Forward. Thank you, Nick. Pleasure to be here. So I want to begin, well, I want to paint a little bit more of the BYD picture. So we know China is installing huge amounts of solar capacity. They installed more solar capacity, I think in 2023 than the US installed cumulatively ever. BYD makes EVs and batteries and buses and solar panels. So there's a huge investment in EV charging and restructure. My question is, so you were at Chrysler in the era where there was maybe an assumption that at least on the automotive level that China wasn't going to catch up. Was there a moment? Was there a series of moments where you realized that maybe there was something wrong with that assumption? And also just retrospectively, where do you feel like Western automakers maybe missed this rise? Well, first of all, you were absolutely right. At the beginning, this is a market that really didn't take off until the WTO accession in 2001. But even prior to that, there were antecedents of the current technology revolution, the scenes had been planted. There was already this idea that we are going to prioritize the mobility sector. The automotive industry is a pillar industry. And I want. In America. No, the way China defines. Sure. Oh, I see. Yes, sir. It's a backbone industry and creates jobs. It creates technology upgrades. And pre-WTO, early 2000s, what is the Chinese automotive industry? It was a stock. It really began in the mid 1980s. Prior to the mid 1980s, in the opening and before-marrow, Dung Xiaoping era, it was largely technology from the so-for-mer-sob union. Sure. That was basically commercialized in the commercial vehicle sector. I came to China in 2004, but that was only just beginning to mature into a Western-dominated world. But from mid 1980s, two JBS were formed, one with American Motors, my former company, because it was acquired by Chrysler. And the other was with Volkswagen Group and joint ventures that were required by the policy for foreign companies to be investing in building up. If they wanted access to China, they had to invest to create a manufacturing enterprise and distribution model that replicated what they had in the West. And Volkswagen dominated the early chapters of what happened in China in the automotive sector. They were the dominant player. They were the passenger car company. GM came in 1997. So it was really the Americans and the Germans who planted the first seeds in the ground. 2001, with the WTO accession, the floodgates of foreign investment came. And again, it was Western-dominated. But from 2001, when the market was somewhere between one and two million units, a V-E-C-L-A-P production, till 2009, it grew from that to the being the largest market in the world. 13.6 million global financial crisis had happened. I was there from '04 to '08 as head of the Northeast Asia business for Chrysler. And turbulent time, because it was Daimler Chrysler, that marriage broke apart in 2007. I left the company in '08 about the time of the Beijing Olympics. That was about the moment in time when you realized something is about to change and it's going to be big. I left Chrysler. I didn't go back to Detroit. I felt that China market was going to be the game changer for the 21st century automotive industry. So I quit my big three job, decided to stay in China because I knew in my gut that this was the market that was going to set the pace for the 21st century. Why? Because the policy seeds had already been planted for the conversion to electrification. But what came later, just a few years after that, was the Internet of Economy coming into the automotive industry value chain. The smartphone, Steve Jobs launches the smartphone 2007, commercializes, launches the 2008. Everybody in China had a smartphone and the Internet world saw mobility as an addressable space. So the ride healing apps came, Internet companies came in and they started investing in redesigning the car as a smart device. That's the period now that we're in. We're in the era of the intelligent connected vehicle. So was it predictable, not in the way it played out, but you knew something was going to happen because there were always playing from behind and they wanted to catch up and go past. I think the part that the Western world wasn't ready for was that China wasn't just capable of catching up, but they could leverage their scale to really change the whole paradigm of the automotive industry value chain. So this is what I'm interested in. It feels to me as someone with some limited knowledge of the automotive industry, certainly relative to you, but that these gains in particular when you look at the big companies, the NIAs, the BYDs, the gains are really pretty recent. But you're talking about going back to 2007, 2006. And obviously, I see what you mean about the Internet of Things, really revolutionizing what people value in cars. And then the sort of orthogonality with electrification, I get that story, but I'm curious in a way what took so long. We were talking about Chinese manufacturing, like you said, after the accession, even before, but there was a lot of manufacturing capacity in China in the early 2000s and the 2010s. It feels to me and correct me if I'm wrong, a lot of this manufacturing capacity for specifically automotive has really come to fruition in the last five years. But was that latent there 15, 20 years ago? What was going on? Again, it was a seed that in the planet, the root system had been formed, but you didn't see the plant. Yeah. The green shoots hadn't come yet. Tell me more about these seeds. So again, the first part of the story was foreign investment in the form of JB's 2009, China becomes the biggest market. And I think that was the point in time when you realized that it had a policy guidance to move away from not only just to attract foreign investment, but to really change the whole idea of how the wheel turned, the propulsion technology was mostly about the hardware and about generating economies of scale from our size. By being the world's biggest car market, it gave China the opportunity to pivot to a new type of a hardware configuration. And obviously the internal combustion engine invented in the 1880s was the moat that if you were to cross it, you would then have relevancy in redefining the paradigm of what a car is. But the thing that I think didn't really, it was never part of the blueprint, never part of the policy guidance, was the idea that the car can be designed with digital DNA. Right, this advent again of the smartphone and the ubiquitousness and the way it which it transformed lives, things that were difficult to do in China became suddenly much easier, like getting a ride. We're talking about a market where you've got 1.4 billion people, the vast majority of which don't have a driver's license and don't own a car. We're talking about a ratio of probably one to ten of people that actually have their own car that they are willing to use every day. That addressable market became the demand pull for the internet to step in and say, I can give you access to mobility. I can democratize mobility through the app-based economy. And when the tenth sense of the world through an app called Qwidee and Ali Baba's of the world, the app called Dede which then merged later became part of the value chain for providing not automobiles but mobility. That's why I call my company Automobility because I'm actually trying to poke in the nose of the Automotive Industry. finding yourself by the hardware, the utility from your hardware is mobility. Solve that. The internet economy is solving the mobility problem. And when they look at a device that's designed for the analog era, they say, "How do I make this not just a mobility dispenser, but a digital dispenser?" Not only a dispenser, but an aggregator of data about people in goods movement. It's that economic, it's that intersection between the internet and communication technology industry and the automotive industry. It's that intersection that creates the disruption. The car becomes over the era that we're in now, a smart device. And as a smart device, China has the software skills to be able to differentiate the car and they have the super scaled hardware size of market, which allows the economics of the technology. In the Western world, we add technology at a cost plus paradigm. We add technology and we price for it. In China, they give it away because the more data aggregation capacity a machine has, the more HMI user interface it has, the more you can monetize the users that are in it. And there are more users in it than there are drivers. So the car is actually designed for everybody, not just for the driver. The Western definition of car is about the driving experience. The Chinese definition of the car is about the user experience. I want to follow up on that. It's really interesting hearing you describe this because I feel like some of the conventional narratives around Chinese development over, you know, particularly since things show up, but you know, in terms of the expansion over the last 40, 50 years, is they got to skip over some of the kind of traditional industrial development and that political economy that it implies by, you know, learning from the West's mistakes, right? And accelerating through those. And in some ways, I'm not loving lobbying any sort of accusations, but, you know, copying certain things or imitating certain things. But what I hear you saying, which is really interesting, is that at least when it comes to mobility and when it comes to vehicles, their strength was in some ways not having a legacy. Not having a choice. Exactly. Right. This idea that they copied our hardware, therefore they, it's no fair. The reality is they changed the business model. Copping the hardware is incidental to the disruption. The fact that they turned the car into a, they turned a caterpillar into a butterfly. And the our definition of car is an analog world driven by a driver. Their definition of car is a user-centric digital experience on wheels. And it doesn't even have to be on wheels because the mobility paradigm can be multimodal. You mentioned BYD. They're in multiple form factors. Many Chinese companies, X-Pang, for example, are not only making robot cars, but they're making V-Tole products. So they're seeing and they're planning human-oriented robots. If it moves and it's got AI, they'll build it. The hardware is not copying the hardware is not the game you want to be playing. You have to redefine what the value proposition or the value chain is and leverage your strengths. And China's value chain leverages not just batteries and electric motors and electronics. It has all that and it has it at a scale that the Western world cannot rival. But they also have a software-based capability set that's far more advanced than the Western world has today. We don't have that in the in the definition of what we're shooting for. Can you just for those of us living in the States, for example, who have essentially no access to most of these vehicles? They're prohibitively expensive due to tariffs and other sort of obstacles. Can you just give us a little bit more detail on what you're talking about about the level of software available to a consumer that's in one of these vehicles? What does the experience look like that's different from a car that we might be using? Without stating the obvious obviously what is a smartphone versus a dumb phone? It's not just a phone. It's not and I'd say it's not just a driving machine and the China context. This is a what do I do when I'm being transported? And I think the the paradigm you have to think about is what does business class or economy class transportation look like in a plane? We don't fly the plane. Are you designing for the cockpit or the cabin? Right? The idea of the cabin is different in China. More screens, definitely UI UX, more voice identification. In other words, I can speak to the car regardless of what seat I'm in and be addressed personally to what my if I say and I'm in the rear right hand side passenger seat say roll down my window. It will identify that's the person saying it that window goes down. It's not everybody or I think there was one of the reviews done on the Xiaomi product identified that the speaker system in the car Mark has brownie the review of the Xiaomi and he said for this price car which is about half of what you pay for a Western car. Simple feature is when the navigation voice comes on the music doesn't stop. Right? Because you do it because you designed the car and you created the OS and you know that you don't necessarily want the music to go away and then come back when the navigation system comes on. So again, that's a vivid description of a difference if you actually do the hardware and the software versus I just do the hardware and somebody else does the software. The car as a computer is really what we're talking about and not only it is in its function as a driving experience or as a passenger experience. If you design it with vehicle to grid or vehicle to infrastructure V2X intelligence, the car becomes a distributed resource within a larger local area and wide area network. Right? It's part of the transportation grid. It can talk to other cars. It can talk to the infrastructure. The car as computer is the 2.0 definition of car that we're living through in China today. You beat me to sort of follow up and I was going to ask which is yeah are we misunderstanding even the the product? Are we misunderstanding ultimately what is coming into these markets? But I want to ask related to that are we then misunderstanding how the product might be disseminated? You know I think again I can only use my American lens as reference I think of a new car even if it's you know Tesla which does go direct to consumer but most other cars if there's a new car if there's some exciting thing let's say you know the Ionic or something. That goes through a dealer and you go to the dealer and it's you know they're selling that car specifically in the sales like you've mentioned is a lot about the body and the chassis and whatever are we either in European markets potentially someday in American markets but global markets in general like is the way that these cars are going to be sold given you know how new and different they are? Going to be different? Yeah I think Tesla is probably the company that challenged the whole paradigm of the entire not not only product architecture but the entire go to market approach and I think bringing in a way of thinking about this is I don't want a B to B to see way of engaging the customer I don't want to I make the car my job ends at the factory I sow the car through a dealer distributor who then puts it in the hands of a customer they challenge that and said I can go B to C. Right. I'd say what we're seeing is the evolution of the B is actually an internet company in China. An intelligent connected vehicle company has digital DNA that's not a traditional car company that's not a traditional car company by the way that's not be like it's it's more like a neo-X-Pang Huawei Xiaomi those companies have a digitally native way of thinking and their natural tendency is to go B to C direct because my engagement model is frequent every day not only when you buy the car my business is OS and software based and app based right and my recurring revenue comes from the transactional business that I do with the person who uses that every single day my frequency of touch point is always on it's not I sell you a car see you when you need to come and get your oil. Well particularly also with EVs and stuff the relationship with the sort of dealer might be completely different because you know you're not going to the dealer that often you're not getting an oil change you don't need a lot of the similar kind of maintenance that you need in the traditional internal combustion vehicles. So think about it this way as a digital native you're gonna want to be B to C you know you're gonna want to be B to B to C and I think Tesla set the course toward that is the objective because they have more technology you know credibility and want not to be they want to disintermediate the traditional dealer based hardware based way of thinking about customer relationship. Now in China it's B to C but back to B because these digital native companies that are building user experiences are not mature service necessarily manufacturing oriented enterprises they may actually engage age, another B, but behind the C, for contract manufacturing their car. Neo, when they started, used the third party B contract manufacturer to build the car, to actually build the car. Huawei doesn't build the car. They do build stuff in the telecommunications sector, which is where they originate. But they primarily do the OS and they do the product design. They're more like Apple. And then they get a third party and it could be a series in the case of the Ito brand. Or in the case of other brands, the Lato of Beijing Auto, they use a contract manufacturer to build the actual vehicle. So you'll find that kind of a paradigm, that the idea I need to be B to C. Now, that doesn't mean you won't need a dealer distributor to service the car, to actually take care of the traditional care and feeding of the customer. Because you don't want to build all the CapEx heavy infrastructure to do that. And I think that's going to be one of the challenges of the Chinese companies' faces. They try to take this model global. They may need to make adjustments to the way they think about the go-to market. Right. I wanted to talk about that. Obviously, let's say tomorrow the tariffs disappear and they're still entering into a pretty complicated regulatory environment in the US. And I believe this is generally the way cars are sold in a place like the EU as well, right? There are dealers. So do you think that they would try and circumvent? Do you think that they would try and set up flagship dealerships? I mean, what? They are. Okay. In fact, the interesting thing is there's a great poll for what the value proposition is that's emerging from China. They just add technology and user-centric paradigm for ways to design the car. They have that. They have it at a price point that's affordable, which is, I think, where dealers and customers benefit. Right. They're having super scaled supply chains and technology that can be delivered at a price that's unrivaled in the Western world. That's the value proposition. Even with the tariffs, the tariffs have an odd. With tariffs have done, for example, China is going global. What's happening in China is not staying in China. Unlike Las Vegas. I mean, China is saying China, because there's a demand for what the Chinese companies are delivering, not just in the electric vehicle category, but also in the conventional ICE or even hybrid flavor. So don't think they don't have a flavor of ice cream that the rest of the world's customers would want to eat. They have that. Affordability is a universal value proposition. But they also have companies that like Xiaomi and even, I would say, Julie BYD traditional companies that are delivering affordable product configurations. By the way, all of what I described on the digital paradigm or the smart device on wheels, the thing that's interesting about China is when those companies come in and create and challenge the traditional automotive industry's way of configuring a car, the traditional companies, the GLEs, the cherries, the great walls, and even the BYDs of the world, they don't look at it and say, "Ooh, I don't want to be like that." They jump to it. They want to build the software capabilities. Or they're even willing to partner with companies that can bring that. So the idea of traditional companies being inspired by the digital disruption that's happening in China, they actually go there. And the Western world takes too long to make that decision. We think of it as a electrification. Actually, when I'm describing here in the digital ecosystems and how they've transformed the car from this caterpillar to the butterfly, the Western world doesn't really talk about it that way. All the media filters out there and talking about China are only talking about the EV part and the tariffs that get erected are about the power train system. Well guess what? What the consumers really want. Interesting, we heard it a little bit in the conference over the last few days. And when somebody comes in and shops for an EV, they need to walk out not with an EV, but with something to brag about. And what they brag about is the tech, the tech, the things that they can actually see. You can't see the electric motor. You don't see the batteries. You see the big screen, right? You see in China's case, you'll see massage chairs, you'll see refrigeration systems, you'll see things that are in your face obvious departures from the traditional way of thinking about the car, a more user-centric design. That's the thing that the world will want to have once they see it and tariffs will actually not stop it. It will not stop it because what it'll do is it'll actually accelerate China's move to go global. Because the tariff walls are to the made in China part. Well, what if I make it in your country, EU? What if I make it in the EU and they're doing that? When the Europe put up a wall, China puts up a factory. When Turkey put up a wall, Chinese companies put up a factory. When Brazil puts up a wall, Chinese companies park their factory right in Brazil. We have to, as the Western world recognized, that consumers want the value proposition that's emerging from China. And we have to decide whether to compete with it, partner with it, but we should not ignore it. That, I certainly think is true. I mean, I saw in research for this that, yeah, BYD opened its first factory in Hungary, for example. Yeah, they're clearly eyeing expansion of production, not just distribution. You mentioned, which I just, again, thing is really fascinating, the proliferation of automotive companies, vehicle companies, particularly EV companies, they're like 100 plus in China. What is it about the market dynamics of China that permits? I mean, we certainly don't, we have nowhere near 100 American companies, forget. Well, we did once. Right. If you go to any museum in the United States, my home's in Reno, Nevada. There's a great museum, their national automotive museum, the harrow, the guy who put up the first casino, bought a lot of cars with all of his wealth. He has a collection of several thousand and the best of them are on display there, great, great place. Hundreds of companies existed in the beginning of the automotive era. In the era of disruption, many startups come. And many, most virtually all fail, but that doesn't change the fact of the disruption. Yes, there are probably 100 brands left in China. They were probably 200 a few years ago. So it is consolidating. It's not 100 companies. 100 brands. Every company has about four or five brands now. So they're probably, and I'm counting in that 100, there's 100, at least 30 of them are foreign brands. So a lot of that number is, it's overstated. If I look at the top 10 sellers of new energy vehicles as they call it in China, 78% of the market goes to them. Nine of them are Chinese companies, one of them is foreign. The only foreign company on the top 10 list is Tesla. Justingly, five of them are legacy companies. BYD, which made a gasoline car before they, and it still make hybrids, before they pivoted completely to NEB. GLE is number two. By the way, both of those companies are not state-owned. They're entrepreneur led. That's the other misconception of China. I think it's all the government. Yeah. Plane, I always spoke about that a little bit earlier. And then you got SAIC, which is a municipal state-owned enterprise, Chang-An, which is a central state-owned enterprise, and Cherry, which is sort of a private company, was formed by this. There's a state-owned ski or something involved. Yeah. But yeah, so that's the other misconception is you got to be a startup in the EV game. You got to be another Tesla. No, you could be a, you could live in both worlds as long as you're taking the profits from the one investing in the other. But then you've got this other class of entrepreneur led startups like X-Pang, like Neo, like Leap Motor, that are in Huawei even. They're not a startup. They're a pivoter. And then you got Xiaomi. These are the real disruptors, right? The ones who are pure digital natives that are really changing the whole paradigm of what a car, what a mobility device is. Let's not call it a car anymore, right? This car has the conjuring up of the, it's got wheels, it's on the ground. A mobility company can make a humanoid robot, can make a V-Tool, can make a moving car with wheels, can make a truck. So relax the thinking of what we are as companies. You're not an automotive company. You're an auto mobility company because the goal is the auto part is still there, but you're not describing the form factor. The auto is, it moves on its own. It moves without animal or human, without a meatbag pulling it, right? The meatbag was the horse once upon a time. Now the meatbag is the driver that's making the decisions on how to move it. And soon the auto part is going to be the robot. Right. It's going to be the AI that we train to make the decisions on how the thing moves. Well, I'm glad you brought up AI because we keep talking about the network effects of this sort of proliferation of technology, of vehicles. And you've mentioned that one of the real advantages of a lot of these Chinese brands is that they integrate with a host of different sort of hard technologies, right? integrate with sort of the software layer of an urban and environment. Again, I think those of us in the states may have a hard time understanding what that actually looks like in practice. So what is the broader digital infrastructure that these vehicles are sinking up with? I know there's a huge proliferation, obviously of autonomy and also an integration, like you said, V2X, right? The vehicles are interacting with infrastructure. But in practical terms, like what does that look like? Yeah, I'd say it's a different, I would describe a system level thinking versus product level thinking. Western OEMs focus on product excellence. And we're good at it. Course power, design, brand heritage. So there's a lot of what comes along with that. It's good in that it allows us to build equity and customer relationship and we can leverage on our foundation of what we built up until now. But at a point in time, where that actually becomes your albatross. In an era of disruption, where the paradigm shifts to something else, your brand heritage and your product pedigree becomes your albatross because you're bound by the legacy, you're carrying over things that don't want to be there anymore. The combustion engine is 140 years when Carl Benz invented it. Great. If you had an IP mode that protected you for 140 years, wonderful. That's probably get put it in the Guinness book. But that's product level definition, right? We are automotive. This is the shape and size and these are the brands that we live with and they're going to be that way in tonight. Challenging that assumption was central to the new paradigm that came again from China. Japan didn't come up with a different idea. They came up new brands, but the car itself a more optimal way of making it. And then the Koreans for all the intensive purposes copied that model and choreified it. China didn't copy the Japanese or the Korean model or even the global model. This they stood on the shoulders of foreign invested joint ventures and learned how to make the stuff, but they had no intention of always making the stuff that we made. The failure of the Western automotive industry is thinking of the legacy of the automotive industry because it includes the Japanese and the Koreans is thinking that that was always going to be the way that China was going to live. That they were just going to live as servants of consuming that which we birthed in the 20th and 19th century. That wasn't a good assumption. Why? Because China takes not a product excellence approach, but a system excellence approach, which includes software. Energy flows. The other thing that they simultaneously looked at was how to why. It wasn't as electrification. Why would they take electrification as a strategy for the automotive industry? Because the automotive industry or the product of the transportation sector consumes the most energy. China was an energy dependent country. It relied on imported oil and gas resources for powering its economy. Breaking that was central to the blueprint for its development plan. Thinking of the car as an energy resource, thinking of it as a consumer of energy, how do I change the paradigm from oil and gas combustion to something that we have energy security with? That's where the lithium ion and the battery sell manufacturing, the prioritization of that sector. By the way, long before the car ever was powered by an electric motor and a battery, there was long investments in building out the capabilities of the battery technology so that it can power bigger machines. That was a 10, 15-year journey. Think about that. Software, energy flows, connectivity, and user engagement. The idea that software and connectivity features are best dispensed in a machine that addresses the user, not the driver. That changes the whole paradigm and how the car. The car is a terminal device in an integrated digital lifestyle and energy ecosystem. In the west, it's still treated as a product that sold every five to seven years. I want to close on just a bit of sympathy for these like as the automakers. Because one of the challenges I think of entering this new, really this new era of mobility, right? If you look at even something like Waymo, which is exciting in the US and is taking off, they're subject to a lot of the same constraints in some ways that the legacy automakers are, which is that these are network technologies, right? They don't, unlike, you know, I mean, yes, you need a network of let's say gas stations, but it's relatively, especially in that era, it was easier to spin up. If you have reliable access to gasoline, you can kind of keep the car running. But with electrification, especially with long range, you really are reliant on coordination between, like you said, you need decent battery technology. So you need to have good relationships with those. But more broadly, you also need to have a really reliable charging network. And I know that this is something that obviously, you know, has been a priority to varying degrees over the last maybe five or 10 years in the US. But, you know, do you think that there is a path that doesn't require a big push of sort of broader electrification and broader sort of infrastructure investment to support this? Or I think the, my biggest worry, because I'm an American and I would like to see the US be competitive in the 21st century mobility revolution. And it's fallen behind. The question you ask is it, is it solvable getting back in whatever the new game is? Well, particularly, is it solvable? I don't know if you can answer this, but is it solvable in the absence of a big intervention? No, there's no policy guidance towards a different paradigm. The policy is doubled down on what the legacy has been. And if we see something new come along, keep it out. That's a policy. In fact, effectively, that's a policy. There is no generation to generation in terms of political leadership consistency. And I've, again, been in China long enough to see the Zhang Jimin, Hu Jun Tao, to Xi Jinping. And one regime to the next doesn't throw out the old playbook. It builds another playbook that builds on the foundation of the previous one. And one thing that's been consistent for more than the time I've been there 25 years, is there's always been a plan for weeding away from the oil and gas. Energy security was always in the plan. And building the infrastructure necessary to get consumers of the products that consume those resources to switch. Those initiatives, those investments were made long before the consumers actually switched. And then being pragmatic enough to know that if the Chinese can't do it, bring Tesla in and get the consumers to get excited about Tesla and then show them the Chinese products as alternatives that are even more affordable. The thing that was never in the blueprint, though, was the internet economy. That's become, that actually took the idea and put it on steroids. It actually, because now you've got companies investing in the technology, not only for electrification, but in turning the carbon to a computer, a smart device that makes my life more convenient, makes the world more accessible to me. Everybody buys into that paradigm in China. And I think that's the part that I think the Western world has not created the equivalent. We have the internet of, we have the internet technology. We have the AI technology. But we're skipping from the analog device driven by a driver to the AI world without going through this reconfiguration of car as a computer. The only company that really seems to get that in the United States is Tesla. It's the only one. Yeah, built out all the charging infrastructure. Right. It's building out the vehicles. Right. But they had to build the charging infrastructure. There was no public, right, other than California, which provided incentives. Right. There really was no public support for what they were trying to do. So they went and said, okay, let me put it on my back. They didn't have to do that in China. Everybody wonders how, you know, how do these Chinese companies come up so quickly? They didn't have to bear all the investment burden on their own back. They take an ecosystem approach. And the ecosystem isn't Chinese company and government. It's a whole network effect of a lot of entrepreneurial China investing in technology and innovation, because they're always on the offense. There's no legacy of the old way that we've done it, that this idea of our heritage is what we build on. Well, what if it's a major discontinuity from the past? What if it's a whole new paradigm of how you're solving the mobility problem? If that's what you're on to, then your legacy becomes your albatross. And there was no legacy in China. These companies are playing offense all the time. There's no defense. What a note to end on, but a lot of food for thought and a really interesting conversation. So Bill, thank you so much for joining us today. Pleasure to be here today. (upbeat music)