Humanoid Robots, Flying Cars & the Battery Breakthroughs of 2026

20:17Elliot Richards:I just want to make sure in the future that my batteries have British salt in them. because I think that's important.

20:24Robert Llewellyn:I don't mind if they're made in China, but I want the salt to be British. Exactly.

20:30Elliot Richards:And I think the other thing we're seeing a lot of news of late is solid state batteries. Yeah, yeah. I'm still, I don't know if I'm sceptical, but come on, we keep seeing announcements saying, we've got the first solid state commercial battery. And it's like, okay, where is it? yeah right you made the announcement you built up the hype but where is it can we test it no it's not ready yet okay um and you know it's still the holy grail right um of battery technology all these announcements but with no real action i just don't really understand what's going on

21:12Robert Llewellyn:no it is very difficult it's very difficult not to get cynical and think it's like you know i suppose hydrogen and nuclear fusion you know there's these there's the sort of group of things all in the energy space where there's a lot of promises and a lot of you know the theory is all fantastic absolutely amazing but to have batteries that are like half the weight double the the energy density and you know a hundred times the longevity i mean they'll last basically longer than about three generations of people. That's what they'd been proposing. Although it was the Donut Labs one, which I watched that and I went, wow, that's it, they've done it, they've finally done it.

21:53Robert Llewellyn:And then as I kept watching, I went, they might have done it. That looks good. And then at the end I was going, who is this dude? He's from Finland, isn't he, I think, the Donut Labs thing.

22:06Elliot Richards:And it's kind of like a theoretical exercise, which isn't, and it's just, you know, we sit and wear it. I think that's what we've seen. Yeah, it's tiring.

22:14Robert Llewellyn:So much of it is tiring, yeah.

22:16Elliot Richards:Yeah. And then the only solid-state tech in China that we've seen so far is semi-solid-state batteries. I think MG has got some solid-state, semi-solid, oh, God, it's such a long sentence. Yeah. Some semi-solid-state batteries in their EVs, but it's still not a big commercial thing just yet. I think we need to wait for someone like CATL to announce, you know, okay, we've got it, we're going to do it, and it's going to become a reality. But until then, it's still a lot of hot air.

22:45Robert Llewellyn:I mean, I think it's just what CATL have done with sodium ion is so – you kind of know that it's very grounded. Yes. There's not a hyperbole in it. And what is really remarkable is the cost. So that might be the claim where you go, oh, my God, is that how much? Because they're talking about – it wasn't$10. I think it was$10 a kilowatt hour. I think it was, yeah. $10 or$20 a kilowatt hour. ridiculously cheap i mean just unbelievable and if that's true and they get anywhere near that even anything sub 50 a kilowatt hour is the absolute game changer it just makes everything you know it just means it means that you would then put a two gigawatt a two gigawatt hour battery next to your solar farm you know because why not make it five gigawatt hours you know you may as well

23:37Elliot Richards:or you can have massive massive batteries for your own home and it only costs you yeah what a couple of thousand pounds or something and it's just yeah this that's why i think it's that's more groundbreaking at the moment than solid state batteries for me yeah yeah um and i think the other the other one um kind of staying on catl so over in the last kind of two months i went to a place near shanghai to visit autoflight now autoflight is a subsidiary of catl and they do evtols electric vertical takeoff and landing flying cars basically i say evtol is that wrong do you think evtols no that's correct it's correct um and but there's been so much progress in this and it's one of the Chinese government's like focus areas.

24:33Elliot Richards:So it's the ultra, sorry, it's the low altitude economy, they're calling it. And they're forecasting it's going to be worth something like$500 billion in 10 years.

24:45Robert Llewellyn:And you know, I didn't understand that till today, I read about them today. So it's, it's, it's machines that fly under 1000 meters high. That's right. Yes, that's what that's what they're talking about. So that norm to 1000 meters which i guess all all other aircraft all commercial aircraft obviously but even private planes would fly way above that you know that's right five ten thousand meters you know they'd be

25:07Elliot Richards:much higher yeah um and we're seeing um so xpeng are doing their uh air land aircraft carrier which is like this big truck with six wheels it's electric with a vtol in the back that you can

25:25Robert Llewellyn:Incredible.

25:25Elliot Richards:Take off. And I saw this like four years ago. I was like, that's just like conceptual nonsense. It's never going to become a reality. But, oh, no, they're putting it into mass production this year. You're kidding me. And selling it.

25:37Robert Llewellyn:And have orders. And have orders. Because I like the fact that you can take it. I mean, I thought there was quite an interesting bit of footage there. So they showed it with this thing comes out the back. And then they showed where you could use it. And it was next to a lake. It wasn't over a town or a suburb. It was like, take it a long way. Yes. So you fly over a lake. So, you know, for God's sake. But I mean, but you can fly it like, I think you can do six flights because you can recharge it off the ground vehicle. That's right. You can plug it into the batteries in the ground vehicle, which is just, yeah, I want one, definitely.

26:12Elliot Richards:But you can imagine like you're sitting on a quiet bench in the Peak District or Lake District somewhere eating a cheese sandwich. And up rocks, I don't know, someone.

26:23Robert Llewellyn:someone grinning at you going just above your head they rock up in their their six-wheeled

26:31Elliot Richards:like truck and then you just hear this and the wings come and they're quite noisy to be honest even though they're electric they're going to be noisy yeah i mean once they're a thousand meters

26:41Robert Llewellyn:yeah yeah the wind oh i mean you imagine that no i mean that's the only time i've fallen over from from air was it was from we this was a military helicopter but we were on an army filming on an army base and they landed one and a soldier said step back a bit so i did i stepped back quite a lot i thought and then it came into land and i and i the wind when the wind hit me i literally fell over it wasn't like it was like being pushed by a big mattress just lost my balance and went flat down and the soldier who told me to stand back a bit was resting on he's like doubled over laughing so much i told you it's a lot of wind but i mean that was a sort of 20 ton helicopter huge thing so but even a thing that can carry two people is going to disturb a lot of air

27:33Elliot Richards:yeah so the one we we saw a demonstration uh from auto flight um and they had three or four of them flying in formation like the red arrows and the smoke coming out the back it was very cool but they did sound like spitfire, like 1940s spitfires going over.

27:52Robert Llewellyn:So they made a very audible, I mean, a very easy, yeah, they made a noise, basically.

27:58Elliot Richards:Yeah, they made a noise. There's a video on the Everything Electric APAC channel showing all of that, so you can have a look at it on there. But these ones are quite cool because they've got these sea kind of vessels that you can, you know, take out into the lake that they can land on. um right and recharge so basically there's this huge floating battery but it's got this like luxury lounge in it and it's driven out into the middle of a lake but they were showing okay yeah you can do it on in kind of this luxury lifestyle way and you know fly around lakes doing tourist things but an actual fact like for forest fires uh they've got a fire and rescue one which can fill up with water then fly out drop water on the forest fire fly back refill recharge fly back so you can do that a lot more frequently and if you have a fleet of them you know you could um theoretically help with forest fires a lot quicker and then another was kind of like um like rescue missions it can deploy um like inflatable life rafts it can deploy winch you know winch down winch up so there's a lot of uses for it and i think aero i'm sorry what's the name auto flight um is their name they they they foresee it being much more of a kind of commercial use than pleasure craft.

29:18Robert Llewellyn:So is the one that comes out of the back of your six-wheel truck, is that a fully autonomous, you don't fly it yourself? You haven't got levers to steer it with?

29:29Elliot Richards:No, I think you do fly it yourself. So you obviously need a pilot's licence or go somewhere where they're a bit more lax with the regulations perhaps. Yes.

29:38Robert Llewellyn:But I think you're right because there was another one I saw which was for cargo deliveries. and you suddenly think yeah that stuff you know is that makes and that was one that was sort of in between a plane and a yes and a drone so it had upwards but it flew along with wings you know that could do like 500 kilometers but carry a like sensible payload of stuff purely electric yeah amazing thing and that that you can sort of see there's definitely going to be uses for things like that that don't need a runway as soon as you don't need a runway you can you've got a

30:11Elliot Richards:huge advantage exactly exactly i do i do foresee a future where they probably replace helicopters like yes i think helicopters are so expensive and so complicated and so dangerous

30:23Robert Llewellyn:helicopter crashes it's just oh god i've been in five i think in my life you know all to do with work and every time i landed every single time i landed i honestly breathed a sigh of enormous relief and knelt down on the ground and kissed the ground because i'm still alive they're amazing machines i mean they're incredible but they are they just seem they now seem i think they look really dated when you see yeah i think well a drone it's got 12 propellers or 18 propellers you know so two of them break you're still you're still you're still one thing that you're hanging from one spinny bit of metal they'll fake a mistake i made in one which was a sort of big uh you know a cockpit glassy cockpit thing as i look back at the rotor going around i went that's that's too thin and frail i'm not gonna live we were over uh we were over las vegas we were filming las vegas from the sky horrendous it was terrifying and no doors you know so it was just

31:26Elliot Richards:yeah anyway yeah that's terrifying but i think if the the price of these come down and then we can use our unitary robots to carry us to our personal drone to fly somewhere for lunch, get fed.

31:40Robert Llewellyn:Yeah, there will be a machine that will actually put the food in your mouth. Yes. I don't want to waste my energy lifting a fork or chopsticks.

31:48Elliot Richards:I'm looking forward to the future.

31:55Elliot Richards:Moving on. Yeah. The last thing I want to talk about was let's bring it back to EVs because I know EV fans out there, myself included. And I kind of want to talk about the market because we've been hearing for many years that the market's going to consolidate. Now we've got too many manufacturers building too many cars. There's overcapacity. You know, what's going to happen? Now we're moving into the year of the horse. So we're just about to leave the year of the snake and moving into the year of the horse. And we are being told that this is the year that, nope, things are really going to consolidate this year.

32:35Elliot Richards:We're going to see brands going under. We're going to see car companies pulling out of China. Yeah, it really is all up in the air. We've seen, I think, companies like BYD are now in over 100 countries worldwide, which is insane. Incredible, yeah. I remember when we filmed that factory tour video in Shenzhen. And that was in 2021 now. And BYD were in one country, which was China. Wow.

33:02Robert Llewellyn:And at that point, were they not selling anywhere overseas at that point? No. Wow.

33:06Elliot Richards:Just in China.

33:09Robert Llewellyn:And very, very few people outside China have heard of them. And now, I mean, I'm in Australia now. Everyone's heard of BYD. They might not know exactly what it is, but they've heard of it.

33:17Elliot Richards:Yeah. And that's in five years. And I know that Julie are very hot on their heels. xpeng are very close behind you know launching in new countries every week but we're you know we're hearing rumblings that um you know some companies are not doing very well we've seen a number of companies go bust in the last kind of two years but we haven't seen any like big collapses or any yeah anything worrying yet um and also we're seeing the legacy car makers fighting back this year so yeah you know bmw have got their neuer class which we think will probably be quite a big success in china uh although bmw don't have much in the way of evs at the moment um

34:00Robert Llewellyn:but would they be built in china if they if they had those or would they be built in germany

34:05Elliot Richards:that's a good question they have a factory we did a factory tour there and they have a factory up in the north so i imagine yes they will be built here because they have an electric um assembly lineup in bmw up there so yeah i think they probably will be um and that i've heard a lot of friends actually talking about oh we would buy one of those if it comes when it comes to china because it's right yeah maybe it offers something that the the chinese brands don't offer i don't know driving dynamics who knows but yeah bmw still has a a big following in china despite the fact they don't have a great EV offering.

34:42Robert Llewellyn:But, I mean, 20 years ago, would you be able to buy a BMW, like a combustion BMW in China? They've been there for a while.

34:49Elliot Richards:Yeah, yeah. They were aspirational brands back then. So the Audis, the BMWs, Mercedes, if you bought one of those, you'd made it, right? Right. They're doing really well. You could show off to everyone else. Now, not so much. Yeah. And then we're seeing brands like Xiaomi come out with their SUV and they're predicted to come out with a new car this year. Maybe we'll see it in Beijing at the auto show later on in the year. But there's a lot moving and I'm not going to make any predictions because it's impossible to make predictions in this market. But there's a lot happening and a lot changing and it's all happening very quickly.

35:29And if you add to that, some of the tech we've talked about,

35:32Elliot Richards:so sodium batteries it's going to bring the price of cars down even more yeah humanoid robots in factories if they can do that replace workers then we're going to see even more affordable models coming out because they don't have to pay people well they don't have to have light is all combined and you know all feeds into each other so yeah i think we're facing a very interesting year ahead of us and yeah both you and i will be hopefully at the forefront of it seeing what's actually taking place.

36:01Robert Llewellyn:Because, I mean, I just quickly, all the reports, finally, all the reports from every news outlet that I've seen in the last month have said, okay, yes, no, electric vehicle sales really increased in 2025 in all these countries. And, I mean, there's some countries where, which I didn't, I mean, Uruguay has a higher percentage of electric car sales than the UK. And you go, what, Uruguay? Hang on. How does that happen? You know, there's a lot of countries that have really kind of jumped into it in a big way. And the UK had record sales and all over the place. There are record sales. Not in America, but we don't need to talk about that.

36:42Robert Llewellyn:But has there been a – do you feel there's been a peak of sales in China and it's softening or is it still going?

36:51Elliot Richards:I would say, so I think we're close to nearly 60 % EV penetration rate now in Shanghai or in China. So we've now reached, we've definitely gone past peak combustion engine. Right, yes. But EV sales are still going gangbusters. I think they are seeing a little softening because a lot of people already have electric cars. They already have cars. the economy here is not doing so well um so people are being a bit more cautious with their spending so in order to spell on sales the car companies are bringing down prices right but they're still not able to shift shift cars um the cars which are selling really well are the small affordable models so julie has a a really small kind of mini hatchback kind of size car it sold nearly half a million cars in 2025 of that one model wow wow and it's it's i think it's seven thousand pounds starts at seven thousand pounds right um we'll be going to the uk and australia this year um but that cut more affordable cars like that selling really well the premium end of the market not so well that's where it's kind of uh struggling and byd is having a slight wobble they've lost some market share i think gone from 12 to about 11 i mean one percentage point but it kind of shows that things are slowing down slightly.

38:18Elliot Richards:And that's why they're having this big push overseas because to replace those China sales, they have to go overseas. And that's why we're seeing overseas sales increase.

38:27Robert Llewellyn:Yeah, because there's a street. I went up it again the other day, a big road in Sydney and you go along it and there's an Audi showroom and a BMW showroom and there's a Polestar. Polestar got a big showroom. That's where I was going. And I can't remember all the other brands, Mercedes and all that. And then right at the end, as the road goes up a hill, right at the top, there's a huge building. It's ten times bigger than that. And it says BYD in huge letters. And it was very funny. The people at the Polestar showroom said, yeah, we want to get letters as big as BYD, but our building isn't big enough.

39:03Robert Llewellyn:Just make the letters bigger. But, you know, that shows the impact they've had here. I mean, you see them all over the place. Well, you know, but they're very common. They're a common brand and a well-known brand here. But that, okay, no, that's wonderful. I can end on some other research I did, which is kind of, you know, I want to sort of remind listeners and viewers that this is said as a fact, not as a hope or a wish, you know, that what's shifted in the world, really in the last five years, but particularly in the last year, is the focus of attention on technology and on new technology and new development.

39:44Robert Llewellyn:And it's just shifted to China. I mean, there was an amazing report. Multiple research documents and government reports from the last two years have indicated that China is leading in 57 critical technology categories and America is leading in seven technology subcategories. So the whole, can you imagine 20 years ago, where's the internet? Oh, it's in America. It's totally American. Electric cars, it's America. Everything was absolutely, you know, new airplanes. Everything was the USA. And then it might be copied in China or in Korea or, you know, Europe or whatever, but it really was. When I was there in the early noughties, it was a, you know, bubbling hive of creativity and innovation and breakthrough technologies.

40:33Robert Llewellyn:And it's kind of, it's all gone to AI. and data centers running on diesel engines owned by Elon Musk. And you just think, well, that's kind of sad. And all the renewable energy stuff is everything, the breakthroughs in renewable energy and battery technology and the biggest wind turbines. I thought Denmark and the UK and the Netherlands, we did the big wind. No, they've done bigger. 20-megawatt wind turbines. It's just insane.

41:04Elliot Richards:It is insane. and that shift is really it has happened so quickly isn't it i mean it's only been a few years and we've seen yeah yeah the like you say all the innovations moving moving to china and yeah

41:17Robert Llewellyn:yeah i guess that's why we're we're talking about it right yes i think it is well i'll let you go i'll let you go at it because we've we've we've chewed the fat a bit yes but but that's but i mean it's really it's such a fascinating shift in i mean i just find i i'm the same as you i just find it absolutely fascinating and yeah intriguing and you know also at the same time occasionally terrifying you know i think i'm slightly terrified of bipedal robots because you know that if you punched one and it punched you back you're dead you know you're gonna break your hand because it's got a metal head and if it hits you you're you're finished you know even i would worry about jason statham winning a fight

42:01Elliot Richards:with a robot even today yeah i would do it i'd like to see that movie actually um i think if anyone wants to see robert punching a robot at one of how everything electric shows around the world. They come to our future tech hub. Yes.

42:22Robert Llewellyn:Very good idea.

42:23Elliot Richards:Oh, very exciting. In Sydney, in Harrogate, I imagine around the world very, very soon. I think once we get going, we'll be doing them all over the place.

42:31Robert Llewellyn:Yeah. No, it is very, very, it's a very, I think it's a great new spur for us, you know, so that, you know, there's definitely, it'll just be a lot of different stuff. Because we haven't mentioned things like phones and AI and, you know, and headsets and glasses and all the other stuff that sort of become, that's, you know, starts out being naff as anything, but might become, you know, some of it will become useful. Yeah, next time we will discuss those things, you know.

42:59Elliot Richards:I think if anyone wants to get in touch and talk about tech that you want to feature or tech that you want us to talk about, then just let us know, get in touch. Happy to take suggestions.

43:12Robert Llewellyn:and we will put some links to i think we should put some links to the the more spectacular videos in the show notes because if you haven't seen the robot kick the man in the yeah it's not funny because it obviously it really hurt it but it is just so typical it's like human frailty writ large yes i mean of all the places he could have kicked him

43:38Elliot Richards:like in the side of the leg no right in the groin right in the groin wallop oh dear that's a good

43:45Robert Llewellyn:place to finish i think very good yes thanks so much elliot and uh i will talk to you soon and uh uh oh i know what i'm gonna say uh do subscribe anyway yes uh to to everything electric and to this particular podcast because this is going to be very exciting and tell your tell your friends and your relatives who might be Chinaphobic, because this will really worry them. No, I don't mean that. And as always, if you have been, thank you for watching.