The journey of automobiles is what Bilbo Baggins of The Lord of the Rings describes as “there and back again". It starts off as electric, turns to the internal combustion engine (ICE) and comes back to electric.

There and back again, the automobile industry has had four pivotal points. First, was in 1881 when Gustave Trouvé demonstrated that automobiles (his was a tricycle) can carry human beings while being powered by batteries. However, the state-of-the-art batteries in the late 1800s were Lead Acid batteries, lacking the energy density to power automobiles over long distances. This led to the second pivotal moment, development of the internal combustion engine (ICE). Daimler and Benz independently invented the ICE in 1885-1886 and powered automobiles.

The energy density of fossil fuel-based sources made ICE-powered cars mainstream and battery powered electric vehicles were relegated to niche applications and children’s toys. This was the equilibrium until an obscure division of Sony in Fukushima, Japan commercialised the Lithium ion battery to power Sony cameras in 1991.

Tesla adopted lithium-ion batteries in 2003 and went into production with the Roadaster in 2008. This introduction of lithium ion batteries to Make Cars Electric Again was the third pivotal moment in automobile history. This led to global automobile manufacturers adopting electric vehicles and announcing massive electrification expenditures in 2022 and that is the fourth pivotal moment. What started off as electric, came back as electric in the end.

However, electrification for any automobile manufacturer is not as simple as replacing the engine with batteries. It involves manufacturing or sourcing batteries, organising them into packs, which are further organized into modules, which are then integrated into an electric motor-powered drivetrain. Just to understand the scale at which........

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