Check Out A Map Of The EV Universe

Republished By Plato

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Recently I came across something really cool: a growing map of the EV industry. It shows the relationships between different manufacturers, suppliers, and everyone else who’s a player in building EVs. It’s called the Map of the EV Universe, and it’s definitely worth checking out — and even contributing to.

When I first opened it, I just looked at it and zoomed around, and just doing that, it’s a good educational experience. However, with just a few minutes of learning, there’s a whole lot more information you can visually get from it. Let’s start with the map itself:

It shows every company, automotive group, platform, model, factory, battery supplier, other suppliers, and even charging companies. Then, it draws the connections between them. You can zoom in, look at the connections, and click on them for more information.

Even though it’s not a complete map of the industry (they’ve got a lot more data to add to get there), it still looks like a big plate of spaghetti when zoomed out like this. It looks at first glance like you’re not going to be able to glean any useful information from it. But to eat any plate of spaghetti, you must take one bite at a time.

To solve that, zoom in and hover over a company of interest. This makes all of the other companies fade into the background so you can focus on what you’re looking at. If you want it to stay that way, click and hold for a couple seconds, and it’s going to stay focused on the company you chose. You can also drag the data around, and like any spaghetti, make it work better for your way of seeing things.

Once you’re locked in on the focus of a group of companies, you can also contract and expand the focus. This allows you to branch further out from your focus company to get a bigger picture, or focus closer, and see a smaller set of connections.

If you’re on a desktop or laptop (and not a mobile device), you can activate filters to look only for certain types of data.

This Is Only The Beginning

All over the site, it says that the map is nowhere near complete. There’s around 500 nodes right now, and the creator anticipates that it will take over 10,000 nodes in the map to be a complete picture of the EV industry.

If you have ideas to contribute to the map, go here to submit them.

Even with only this small start, it’s impressive to see how far the EV industry has come. There are dozens of models, when in the past, choices were a lot more limited. Just think back to 2010. Any random member of the public from 2010 would be very surprised at how things are today.

I know that I’m going to use this map in the future to get more of a bird’s-eye view of the industry when I’m writing about a single player. Being able to see the bigger picture and know how everything relates to everything will make it a lot easier to make sense of events and trends in the industry.

Featured image: A screenshot from Map of the EV Universe.

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