Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshadrati.

A couple of weeks ago we put out an episode talking all about electric cars and how they went from Fringe Tech to mainstream.

Cars though are only half the electric vehicle story. There are also billions of two and three wheelers that need to be electrified,

alongside vans, trucks, and buses.

In this bonus episode of Zero, we're joined again by Colin McCracker, Bloomberg

NEF's head of advanced transport to look beyond electric cars and hear how electrification

is going for other forms of road transport and whether batteries are still

the best tech to power them.

About half the vehicles in the world are passenger cars. There are all these other types of vehicles

that also need to become electric. So let's start with the second

largest, which is two-wheelers. Go to anywhere in Asia, two-wheelers are at the mode of transport

of choice. Two-hundred million two-wheelerers today in the world are electric. 99% are in China.

Yeah, and this is a really remarkable policy success story, if you will.

And it's worth bearing in mind, as you said, that if you're sad in Europe or North America,

it's difficult to picture just how different the mobility mix is in different countries.

And so the China's success story there is another urban policy one largely,

which said,

you can't drive combustion two-wheeled vehicles in the city for noise reasons and urban air quality

reasons were just straight out banning them.

And interestingly, lithium ion batteries weren't really ready at the time when that happened.

So a lot of those originally, when that came out, were lead acid batteries.

So we're starting to see more and more lithium ion coming into that as well.

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