Wow, Elon Musk recently announced the production of the Tesla semi-truck. Deliveries to Pepsi as 1st customer expected on Dec 1. The truck looks insane (see pic above) 🤯

I remember speaking to one of my friends, who manages a large family office portfolio, about a year back. They are big Tesla bulls and while I always admired Elon’s vision, I didn’t know first-hand the level of innovation Tesla was shipping & its head start over incumbents.

Earlier this year, I started driving a Model 3 as my 2nd car (my main car till then was a gasoline SUV). Post experiencing an EV for the first time, and in particular, the way Tesla has re-imagined the end-to-end software & omnichannel services stack around the car (from an eCommerce buying experience to home maintenance services), I called up my portfolio manager friend and said: “Now I know what the fuss is all about 🙇🏽”

With the launch of the electric Ford F-150, Rivian pickup trucks finally being seen on the roads & now the Tesla semi-truck launch, 2022 seems to be a tipping point in EV penetration across auto use cases. Helped in no small measure by tailwinds of high inflation in gasoline prices courtesy of the Russia-Ukraine war.

As a customer, I can see that once a household transitions to EV, it’s super hard to go back to gasoline. Urban commute as a use case is already solved for. Once EV cars hit critical volume, am positive the supercharger installed base along freeways will rapidly ramp up, as will the battery range itself.

EV is a space that is constrained by supply right now, not demand. It’s pretty much inevitable. As a venture investor, am bullish on startups building software for the EV value chain. In the California gold rush, the money was made by those selling picks and shovels. As EVs (& lithium-ion batteries, in general) penetrate our lives, the market opportunity for software that powers various use cases in its ecosystem is immense.