| Thanks for reading Hyperdrive, Bloomberg's newsletter on the future of the auto world. Last week, I attended the annual gathering of NaatBaat International, a trade group focused on building a homegrown battery industry in North America. The crowd of startup executives, scientists and consultants was about 20% smaller compared with last year's conference, a reflection of the headwinds the industry is now facing. Automakers walking back their electrification plans and the collapse of battery hopefuls like Sweden's Northvolt are spooking investors and denting demand for businesses in the fledgling supply chain. Meanwhile, Chinese producers continue to grind down battery costs to a level that renders many upstream projects in the US and Canada unviable, at least in the short term. Then there's the maelstrom of US politics, with sweeping cuts to federal government, tariff threats and general uncertainty sown by Donald Trump. The president's executive order to create a White House council focused on energy dominance this month was heavy on talk about oil, natural gas and critical minerals, but never mentioned batteries. America's battery industry seems to be in limbo, neither condemned nor favored by the president. "There's not a single piece of paper that lists batteries in the affirmative or negative,'' Ben Steinberg, a lobbyist who represents battery materials firms at Washington-based Venn Strategies, said at the conference in Orlando, Florida. "You're left out of all the executive orders, but you also didn't get labeled as part of the 'green new scam.' This means we have work to do."  The production floor at Linamar's EV battery-case manufacturing facility in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Photographer: Liam Kennedy/Bloomberg Another attendee, Dave Howell, is a veteran Energy Department official who most recently led the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. He's now a lobbyist trying to forge a new political message for the industry that focuses on national security and independence from China, and steers clear of talk about climate change. His pitch: tighten access to the $7,500 consumer EV purchase tax credit by applying strict local content rules, and increase the $35 per kilowatt-hour battery cell production tax credit so it can benefit US-based producers of materials including graphite, nickel, manganese and silicon. "Couple that with potential tariffs, and that may actually tip the scale for us," Howell told me recently. Despite Trump's anti-EV rhetoric and a slew of delayed vehicle launches, the outlook for US battery production hasn't changed much since the election, according to Michael Sanders, an analyst at consulting firm Avicenne Energy. EV sales are still growing — they were up 30% in January, according to Cox Automotive – and Sanders said he expects fully electric models to be 25% to 27% of new-car sales in the US by the end of this decade, up from 8% last year. Combine that with the boom for electricity-hungry data centers, the need to manage renewable energy assets and the ongoing push to expand EV charging infrastructure, and battery supply and demand should be roughly aligned by 2030. Even if President Trump guts the IRA, it won't change the fact there's a massive need to build out America's grid storage network, something Wall Street actually wants to finance, he said. There are even hints that Trump's funding freeze at the DOE has begun to thaw. Cirba Solutions, a North Carolina-based battery recycler, was awarded two different grants under Biden's infrastructure law: a $75 million one to upgrade a battery-recycling plant in Ohio, and another $200 million to build a battery-processing facility in South Carolina. After the DOE's reimbursement checks stopped arriving for a couple weeks in January following Trump's inauguration, the money is now flowing again, said David Klanecky, Cirba's CEO. "Our narrative for Cirba is, we're going to recover and refine critical minerals — it resonates no matter what,'' he said. Others aren't doing so hot. Freyr Battery and Kore Power have scrapped ambitious plans to build cell plants in Georgia and Arizona since the election. Nanograf, a Chicago-based startup that was awarded $60 million to build a Michigan facility making high-silicon anode material for EV batteries, is still waiting for the DOE to finalize its grant. It also needs to secure offtake agreements with cell manufacturers and obtain private financing to match the grant money, said Jeff Helm, an adviser to the company. "Everything's on pause," said Helm, a former sales executive at Nanograf who has since joined a battery company targeting the drone market. "I think that's the harder part in this climate — the fundraising side of it."  Pedestrians walk across a footbridge in front of Nissan's headquarters in Yokohama, Japan. Photographer: Toru Hanai/Bloomberg Nissan is once again looking for a superhero. Some 26 years ago, it was Renault and an aggressive, cost-cutting executive named Carlos Ghosn who pulled the Japanese carmaker back from the brink. Now, with CEO Makoto Uchida facing a possible boardroom coup and the company in financial free fall, there isn't an obvious savior. Having presided over an aging product lineup, shrinking margins and yawning credibility gap, Uchida is running out of time. | 
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