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Hi everybody, welcome to shift, a podcast about mobility. I'm Pete Bigelow, your

host and reporter at the Automotive News. Joining me on the podcast today is

Tiffany Sadick, a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School and editor-in-chief of the school's Journal of Law and Mobility.

She wrote a really interesting essay last week about the need to keep human drivers in quote-unquote

driverless cars. We'll be talking about that in just a bit, but first it's time for a look at this week's headlines and my colleague

Molly Boegon joins me for that. Hi Molly how are you today?

Hi Pete doing all things how are you? I'm doing good. Hey one of the biggest or one of the most interesting and or biggest stories I read this week came from from you.

I'm curious about General Motors delaying investments into Lithium, which is a topic that you are

extremely well versed in if I dare say so. Yes, yes. Yeah, it's an interesting story. So General Motors had a plan to invest

650 million dollars of equity into the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine Project in in Nevada which I actually went to go visit

earlier this year. So one sort of tranche of that funding was already delivered and

the the automaker had planned to deliver the second batch in August and pushed that timeline into December.

So there are a few reasons for this.

One is because the companies are trying to work out

a more mutually beneficial arrangement

in terms of the equity investment because they made this deal when lithium America's stock price was much higher and so this 330 million dollar investment would result in GM owning more than 40% of lithium America

which you know is just sort of different than the companies were expecting and

would be deluded to other shareholders in the company.

And then the other thing that they're considering is that the GM loan is dependent on the finalization of a Department of Energy loan.

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