Shift is sponsored by Gentex Corporation.

Gentex is a long-time supplier of electro-optical products for the global automotive,

aerospace, and fire protection industries.

Visit Gentex.com to check out the latest in digital vision, connected car, and dimmable glass

technologies. Hi everybody welcome to another episode of Shifts I'm Pete Bigelow, your host and reporter at the Automotive News.

Hi everybody, this is Leslie Allen. I'm the editor of Shift magazine.

Nice to have you joining us once again. Joining us on the podcast today is the Department of Energy's Michael Baraby.

He is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Sustainable Transportation.

Leslie obviously a very timely podcast here given the the new EV sales targets

and greenhouse gas emission targets unveiled the late last week by President Biden.

Definitely. When I had my conversation with Michael, he was saying that transportation is

about, accounts for about a third of energy usage and also greenhouse gas emissions in this country.

So this is a huge segment of the economy and a big target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

No doubt, no doubt. And it's really kind of fascinating to think about, I had a deja vu moment a little bit when I heard about the new sales targets and it took me back to I think what was, you know, 2008, 2009 when President Obama talked about all the electric vehicles, I think the target was a million electric vehicles by 2015 at the time and obviously that did not happen.

When you were talking to Michael, did you get any sense on how these targets are kind of crafted and put together behind the scenes before they announced this big grand ambitious number?

No, I didn't get any insight on that,

but I'm sure that as the days go by,

we're going to hear a lot about how we're going to get there.

One thing that we did talk about, we talked about

advances in battery chemistries, so this interview will mention some of the work that's going on that the DOE is helping to fund. They just

issued a bunch of grants to companies that are working on better battery

chemistries and not just they're also talking about the

...