Hi everybody. Welcome to Shift, a podcast about mobility. I'm Pete Bigelow, your

host and reporter at the Automotive News. My guest today is Wendy Bauer, Vice President of Automotive and Manufacturing for Amazon Web Services.

We'll be talking about generative AI's fledgling influence throughout the auto industry and the advent of

software-defined vehicles and more. But first, my colleague Molly Boegon joins us for

headlines. Molly, how are you today? I'm good, thanks Pete. How are you?

I'm hanging in there, but doing good. Thanks for joining me. Yeah, happy to be here.

Molly, I'm curious about a story that you wrote this week about American brand awareness of Chinese

EVs.

It kind of had an ominous tone to it, at least from an American perspective I suppose what what do American

consumers know about Chinese EV brands right now? So yeah this this was from

our coverage of the Alex Partners EV Consumer Sentiment Survey.

The findings were basically that the majority, 58% of Americans who are likely to buy an electric

vehicle, are familiar with Chinese brands like

BYD and that percentage grows even more for younger groups for buyers 18 to 25 that was 76 percent and for buyers 25 to 35 that was

73 percent so Alex partners experts that we spoke to on the media call were

saying that the these are the buyers of tomorrow and while Chinese

electric vehicles are not yet exerting, you know, major influence over the American consumer, this is a global market and this is a sort of, yeah, an ominous sign for traditional automakers.

It certainly seems like the younger buyer aspect of that is particularly concerning as that if you're a

Ford or GM or Stilantis as those are the consumers of tomorrow that are going to buy multiple cars

over the span of their lifetime.

Yeah, and you know the Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers, as many of the listeners will know,

are able to compete on so many different things.

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