The news is showing a glimpse of hope in the supply chain of semiconductors and microchips. Some headlines even read “Chip shortage? Some industries now have too many”. I find the story a little misleading as one of the world’s largest consumers of high-end semiconductors and microchips, Nvidia, just announced a price reduction of their computer graphics cards as they state the reason being over the ordering of graphics card production. First of all, this will have little to nothing to do with the chips that the automakers are waiting for because as I understand it they are still using much older technology and those chips are still in high demand and short supply. I also think that the real reason Nvidia is seeing the oversupply is that demand for their product for cryptocurrency mining basically fell off of a cliff and the people that owned their cards for mining are liquidating them on eBay for a crazy discount. Right now a card that Nvidia was selling for almost $2,000 you can find on eBay all day long for around $1,200. All that being said we are still waiting on many vehicles, some orders 10+ months ago, most of these units are what the manufacturers call build shy. Build shy basically means that they have built the vehicle as much as they can with the available parts and they can not finish production until they receive the parts they are missing. There is still no real timeframe being given on these vehicles either as it seems most of the new infrastructure and grant money for chip production has been going into higher-end chips than the auto industry uses.
Last mile delivery vehicles are becoming a very competitive market. Several big manufacturers and start-ups alike are fighting for their position in the new world of doorstep delivery that we live in. Recently, my favorite EV start-up, Canoo, landed an agreement from Walmart to purchase 4,500 of their “llifestyle” model of vehicle. Canoo is also making a multi-purpose delivery vehicle called the MPDV and has a pickup truck planned off of their lifestyle vehicle design. I have seen a lot of questions about why Walmart chose the lifestyle vehicle instead of the MPDV, and for the task, Walmart is using these vehicles for it makes a lot of sense. These vehicles will be mostly delivering groceries and other smaller goods to customers that live close to the facility where the vehicle will be staged. The delivery version of the lifestyle model can still carry almost 1,500lbs of payload and is touted to have a 250-mile range. Both of these statistics perfectly accomplish the goal of the vehicles for Walmart. I really like Canoo because of its willingness to challenge conventional ways of designing vehicles. This, I believe, really sets them up well to solve a number of problems with some specific applications of vehicle use. Take a look at some of these custom designs canoo has come out with for street vendors. The available 80kwh onboard battery can serve multiple functions from cooking food in a food truck to running displays and point-of-sale systems. I can’t wait to see the future of this company as is seems many people are considering the 50% increase in Canoo stock price after the Walmart announcement. I hope this order from Walmart is a sign that these vehicles will start to be shipped to customers this year as the company is currently stating. I would expect supply chain issues to be able to wreak havoc on a smaller startup but see this as a good sign.
GM is working with Pilot Flying J travel stops to add 2,000 new EV chargers along
US highways. These chargers will be co-branded Pilot Flying J and Ultium Charge 360. These charges will be installed at over 500 Pilot Flying J facilities and will be operated by EVgo a company that as of right now manages 850 charging stations across 30 states. These chargers will be DC fast chargers stated to be capable of offering up to 350kW. They have released a map of the charging locations planned which mostly seem to be focused around the rust belt and surprisingly very few on the west coast.
