Transcriber: Tiago Mendes-Costa Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
Hi. Em, yeah.
I'm gonna tell you something about what's happening in the car industry.
And I thought let's...
Let's have the first picture put on the screen.
This car.
I'd like to see some hands.
Who already has seen this car on the road?
Who knows this car?
Okay. That's quite a lot.
Well...
A friend of mine has one.
And...
When I talk with him about it, he's..
He's always super enthusiastic.
He says "Yeah, this car, it just accelerates like hell!"
"It's crazy!"
"And it has this huge screen!"
"And I can download apps on it."
"And I can surf the web."
"It's amazing!"
"It's not just an electric car."
"It doesn't drive electric. It's more than that."
And...
Well, there are also the non-enthusiasts.
And I say "Well yeah, but it's heavily subsidized."
"And that will never grow."
"And it still charges in hours."
Well that's gonna change.
And that's what I'm talking about today.
Em...
What's my background?
I'm CEO and founder of Fastned.
Fastned builds charging stations.
Like this.
Just like a regular gas station.
They're situated along the highway.
And you can just exit the highway,
go into the charging station,
put the plug in the car,
press start
and 20 minutes later the car is full.
What that will do is that will give
electric vehicles drivers the freedom to drive wherever they like,
just like a gasoline car.
Why do you buy a car?
You buy a car because it gives you freedom.
That's why you want it.
And that's what we're going to do.
Basically the same as Shell or BP that puts on
gasoline stations.
So why do I think that this industry
is headed towards this Kodak moment?
Kodak is the classical example of
the photography industry being disrupted by the digital camera.
And what we see here,
what we see happening with the electric car
is to some extent the same.
We see cars becoming electric.
It's becoming an electric appliance.
And it follows a totally different course
and experience curve than we are used to from mechanical products
like the current fossil fuel car that we know.
And this electric appliance
it just goes through a cost curve
that you know from the LCD TV that you have at home,
from the improvement that we've seen in digital cameras.
Year on year these products get better and better and better.
And that is disruptive.
That's highly disruptive.
If you look at solar panels,
more and more houses in the Netherlands,
they are putting solar panels on their roofs.
Why are they doing that?
Well, because of this:
this curve going down, down, down.
Year on year improvements in solar cells
are around 20%.
20% per year to get cheaper, better, etc.
And what that means,
if you do that every year,
at some point, you'll cross that line of grid parity.
At some point, your energy from the solar panels
will become cheaper than
the energy that you can buy from the grid.
And the same is happening with batteries.
The batteries, that's the main cost component of our electric car,
they're getting cheaper and cheaper every day.
We've seen the same from digital cameras.
Digital cameras got better.
They got more capacity of photos.
They got more megapixels.
In 10 years, the industry went from 0 to 100% adoption.
When the photographers didn't like
the camera in the beginning,
they now love it.
And we see the same happening with electric cars.
They will charge faster.
They will have more range.
And it's not as fast as the digital camera in development,
but it will be around 20% per year.
And I think, if we translate that to the car industry,
this is what we see happening:
this was an extract of the Auto Bild,
a German car magazine.
It basically states the opinion,
or let's say how the Germans thought about the introduction of the Tesla.
Last month,
Tesla sold 289 vehicles in the Netherlands
of the type Model S.
In that same month, BMW and Audi combined sold...
244 Audi A6 and BMW 5 series.
That's what I call disruption.
In 1 or 2 years, you got a serious market share.
It's already happening in this luxury segment.
Then besides price,
what else,
why would it be disruptive?
An electric car, you can charge it at home.
And at home, electricity is very cheap.
You can basically put your car in a wall socket.
It's a huge incentive for people to buy a car. Why?
If you drive it for 2 Euros for 100 km,
and you have your own parking space for your car near your home,
that makes a lot of sense.
You basically get a 0 marginal cost product.
So the whole cost perception of the product of an electric car
will be totally different than a gasoline car.
And that will be disruptive.
This is what's gonna happen in the end.
What we will see is in the coming 10 to 15 years,
we will see this market accelerate
Today this market is growing
at 50 or 100% per year.
And that will accelerate.
And it will go through the hockey stick in the coming years.
And that means that in the end,
gasoline stations will be disrupted.
The existing car brands that are sitting ducks,
they will be disrupted as well.
Only car brands that will really really step in,
and today start their development,
they will get there,
they will be able to go along.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)