The climate case for flying cars

Zero: The Climate Race

Bloomberg

Technology, Business, Science

4.7 • 219 Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2023

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Electric aviation fulfills two futuristic promises – flying cars and emissions-free air travel. This week, meet the professor who is working to make it happen. Venkat Viswanathan, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, is working to create a battery that can power an aircraft on a trip over 200 miles. Venkat talks to Akshat about the network of people involved in electric aviation, how long it will take to develop such a light and powerful battery, and why aviation is the most important problem for batteries to solve.

Read a transcript of this episode, here.

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd and our senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Special thanks to Blake Maples, Stacey Wong, Sharon Chen, and Kira Bindrim.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshadratti.
0:03.0	This week, the Jetsons, flying cars, and batteries.
0:08.0	Why are you Venkat, driving us to so many battery companies?
0:21.6	Maybe I know a thing or two about batteries.
0:23.6	No, I mean the other answer is we would have gone to battery companies whether Venkut was here or not.
0:30.6	Because batteries are cool.
0:32.6	But with Venkat, we get a level of...
0:35.6	Level of fear in the companies that, oh, we're going to get like these hard questions
0:40.5	because in batteries, if there is a breakthrough, you basically have about half a dozen people
0:47.8	in the world who can really get to the bottom of it and say, yes, this works, or no, this doesn't
0:53.6	work.
0:54.6	And Venkut, you're one of those dozen people.
1:00.5	This is Venkut Wisvanathan, a battery expert who I often turn to for help with discerning
1:06.4	good battery ideas from bad ones.
1:09.5	Batteries are a crucial technology in our zero emissions future, but batteries are also complex,
1:15.3	and many people use that complexity to create a hype around their particular idea of a battery,
1:21.6	which turns out to be bunk.
1:25.0	Venkut is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and he is deeply linked to many
1:29.8	climate tech startups.
1:32.0	He came with Zero's producer Christine Driscoll and I on a tour of startups in Silicon Valley
1:37.1	last year.
1:38.5	We traveled in Venkert's Tesla Model 3 for hours that week and we debated many things.
	...

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