Hi everybody. Welcome to Shift, a podcast about mobility. My name is Pete Bigelow. I'm your host and a reporter to the Automotive News.

We've got back-to-back conversations for you. and a reporter to automotive news.

We've got back-to-back conversations for you on today's episode. My colleague Hannah Lutz was at the Battery Show this past week

and sat down with Pam Fletcher,

formerly of General Motors, and now of Battery Start-Up. and

sat down with Pam Fletcher, formerly of General Motors and now of battery startup

Sion Power. And Hannah also recently checked in with Lauren McDonald of

EV adoption for a status report on the EV Charger rollout. Those are coming up in just a moment.

First, I've got a solo look at this week's headlines, one obvious and one perhaps less so.

Tesla held its much anticipated Rolo Taxi unveiling on Thursday night,

and as expected, it was long on Flash and short on detail.

We all knew of course that Elon Musk would show off a new robot taxi.

The key of course to me is when will that robot taxi be deployed at meaningful scale.

2027 he says and in the same breath Elon noted he's been overly optimistic on

such predictions before. Those predictions or promises you might call

them should be noted started in 2014 when Elon said autonomy would be here by 2020.

To be fair, many other companies said something similar in those early days.

But in 2015, Elon said full autonomy in 2017.

In 2016, he said robot taxis would be ready in 2020.

And in 2019, it was next year, there'd be a million robot taxis on the road and so on and so on.

So this idea that they're two years out now feels right on brand. By the way, watching Elon ride a highly scripted

route in the cyber cab near a Hollywood stage reminded me that there is a

...