Blue Dot Motorworks

https://lnkd.in/gtsHKyWc Back by popular demand, here is time lapse of building the first EscapePod prototype! This is at 300X speed, and I’d still be very surprised if anyone makes it through the whole thing. It highlights to me why the traditional VC mindset is going to struggle to have meaningful climate impact, as heavy hardware solutions are required and the weeks of work represented here is the developmental equivalent of hitting the “compile” button once.

Come to the Electrify Expo at UW in Seattle this weekend (9/14-9/15)! We will have our prototype in the "Showoff" car show section. We'd love to see you there! https://lnkd.in/gEwDe2Sj

All of these brands have dialed back their initially aggressive EV transition plans. Does this mean that we have lost our chance of achieving climate goals for the mobility sector? No it doesn't, but only because because we never had a chance in the first place. Not only were these optimistic production transition plans woefully insufficient to drive fast-enough turnover of global vehicle stocks, for years it has been mathematically impossible to hit the target through new EV production. If we could start selling 100% EVs tomorrow, we'd still accumulate 300-500% of the sector emissions allowed by the Paris Agreement. This tempering of strategies just means that we will miss more badly, and that the need for alternative solutions is existential. How on earth is vehicle conversion not a part of the mainstream conversation?

Kick off Seattle Climate Week with a bang! Blue Dot has been selected as one of five startups to pitch at Founders Live, and we are PUMPED! So come by Georgetown Steam Plant on Monday at 6pm, enjoy the show, and cast your vote for your favorite climate champion. https://lnkd.in/gRHhif8M

Come check out our Narwhal prototype (and a whole bunch of other cool rides) at the Greenwood Car Show on Saturday! We will be with the Seattle Electric Vehicle Association, so you will get to see some other sweet EV conversions. https://lnkd.in/gdMzXMmi

What to do when you discover that the test vehicle for your upcoming prototype has a rotted-out frame, rendering it unfit for purpose? Roll up your sleeves and bust out the welder. They say being a founder involves a lot of blood, sweat, and tears...well sometimes the first two are quite literal. And a few key tools choosing the wrong time to conk out can bring you to the verge of the third! These are the times when returning to your North Star will help you power through. For me, that's the human impact of climate change and knowing how big of a difference our solutions can make.

Blue Dot Motorworks is pumped to be accepted into Accelicity's Launchpad 11 program. It's amazing to be working with startups from 70 countries addressing sustainability challenges being faced by communities around the world. This is a tough row to hoe, and being surrounded by a cohort of dedicated folks fighting the good fight is incredibly buoying. https://lnkd.in/gdT9gVeR

We are thrilled that our second patent was just published. There’s tons of good stuff in there for decarbonizing road transportation. We have multiple architectures of the Narwhal and Humpback for electrifying existing gas and diesel vehicles, some of which leverage emerging technologies and others that rely only commodity tech. There’s also innovations around adding a range extender to an electric vehicle, the first of which will be our next prototype: imagine a 2-ft long trailer that doesn’t articulate, steers itself, and can carry extra batteries, a generator, a fuel cell…or even just your camping gear. Can’t wait to get that one fabbed up!

Remember this? Remember how they spent the entire movie struggling to come up with a replacement for the plutonium the time machine was designed for? Plutonium is expensive, dirty, and had to be acquired from, let’s say, problematic foreign sources. Then at the end we see that the Delorean has been retrofitted with a Mr. Fusion, and it can now run on cheap, clean, domestically produced garbage. Really, we’re doing the same thing at Blue Dot Motorworks . Over 98% of cars on the road were designed to run on expensive and dirty fossil fuels that are often sourced from “problematic foreign sources”. Our Narwhal and Humpback retrofits enable them to run on cheap, clean, and domestically produced electricity. Maybe we should rebrand to “Mr. Electric?”

The EPA just revised the rules around vehicle emissions. So I thought I would do a deep dive into how these new regulations will affect sales, stock turnover, emissions, and the US’s future contribution to increased global temperature. What I like about these regulations: ·       They are technology agnostic What I don’t like about these regulations: ·       They only affect the emissions of future vehicles and are therefore doomed to fail ·       They are a supply-side “fiat.” I prefer demand-side economics as the major policy lever. ·       They leave the door open to future relaxation or abandonment if demand doesn’t support the dictated supply ·       They will devolve into a clumsy form of carbon tax if enforced/penalized at the point of sale (as almost all mandates and incentives do)   TLDR: Even if we hit the targets in these regulation, we will blow right past the carbon budgets for the sector: 1.5C around 2031 and 2.0C around 2078. Actually hitting the targets will require dramatic exponential growth (54% Compound Annual Growth Rate - CAGR) of plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) sales, far in excess of what we’ve seen recently. Bad news, but then even with the most aggressive adoption policies imaginable, we still won’t hit our climate targets. We very simply need a solution to decarbonize conventional cars that are already on the road and that will continue to be produced for almost two more decades. www.bluedotmotorworks.com Details, additional comments, and assumptions are in the comments.