Call it what you’d like: an inflection point, a milestone, a crossroads, a defining moment.

Either way, the point is that we’re living through a period of significant change in the auto industry, as electric vehicle demand outstrips supply, sales of internal combustion vehicles potentially peak, and traditional automakers and governments alike commit tens of billions of dollars toward electrifying the car.

• In 2021, EV sales accounted for nearly 10% of all new passenger-vehicle sales worldwide. That figure could more than double to 23% by 2025, according to the latest installment of energy research firm BloombergNEF’s annual EV Outlook report.
• EVs represent a $9 trillion market opportunity between now and 2030, per BNEF.

But, key questions remain. Namely, is the current momentum enough to reach 2050 net-zero goals for transportation?

The short answer, per BNEF’s new report, is no. Not without major adjustments. While some segments of transportation are close to being on track for net-zero goals—i.e., 100% zero-emission vehicle share by 2050—others are further away.

• On our current path, BNEF also anticipates that the existing EV adoption gap between “wealthier countries and emerging economies” will widen further.
• Leading markets are projected to surpass 60% market share of EVs by 2040, while EVs will make up less than 20% of all vehicles in emerging markets by then.

Addition by subtraction: While EVs are a necessary tool for reducing transportation emissions, they’re not the only tool. Reducing vehicle dependency by investing in public transportation, walking, and biking can have a significant effect on lowering emissions, per BNEF—and make net-zero goals more attainable.

• “Governments should prioritize investments in these areas, many of which also have concurrent health benefits,” the authors wrote. “An ‘all of the above’ approach is needed to stay on track for net zero.”

Big picture: Although substantial progress has been made on EV adoption in wealthier countries, continuing on the current path would mean the vehicle-transportation sector still emits 3.5 gigatonnes of CO2 per year in 2050, BNEF estimates. For context, the entire transportation sector—including aviation and shipping—emitted 7.2 gigatonnes in 2020, per the IEA.

Read the full story on-site.—DM

When movies, jokes, or athletes flop, it’s a bad thing. For supercomputers, on the other hand…the more flops the better.

Wait, what? Flops, or floating-point operations per second, are a key measure of computational performance and the basis of the annual Top500 supercomputer rankings that were released earlier this week.

The leading supercomputer in 2022 is the Frontier system, located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. It is “the first true exascale machine,” Top500 says, as it is the first known to demonstrate exaflop-level performance. The system was built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise—which helped build 19.2% of the computers on Top500’s list—and uses chips from AMD.

• An exaflop is equal to 10^18 flops. As the New York Times puts it, that means it can handle “a billion billion calculations” per second.
• There might be two true exascale-level supercomputers in China, but the country did not submit results to Top500 this year.

These room-sized, high-speed computers are used for more than just the computational Olympics. For its part, Frontier is expected to help with research in areas like medicine and clean energy. In general, the plurality (26%) of systems on the Top500 list are intended to aid researchers, but there are other applications too, including...

• IT services (13%), cloud services (13%), and weather and climate research (8.7%).
• Nearly half (47%) of the computers are owned by “industry.”

Plus, as the NYT points out, the companies involved—HPE and AMD—could see increased interest in their computing products thanks to their part in claiming the No. 1 spot.

History lesson: ENIAC, an apartment-sized system considered to be the first computer, could process ~500 flops in 1946. The smallest computers on the 2022 Top500 list are capable of 1.65 petaflops of performance. Petaflop= 10^15 or 1,000 trillion flops.

Click here to read on-site.—DM

Stat: A biotech startup called Ultima Genomics claims it can sequence an entire human genome for $100. It cost about $95 million to sequence a full human genome in 2001.

Quote: “It is always going to be the case that you will release things that do things that you didn’t anticipate, and the question is how you really quickly respond to those things to contain the impact.”—Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, to Emerging Tech Brew

Read: A review of the Murena One, a $369 Android phone that has been “de-Googled” in an attempt to better preserve user privacy.

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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• Meta is changing its stock ticker symbol to…META.
• Nokia’s CEO is already making 6G predictions.
• Leaked documents show a major label has invested heavily in automating its roster of musicians.
• For the first time, doctors transplanted a 3D-printed ear onto a human patient.

For nostalgic graphics: A thread of 80s and 90s data visualizations. Our verdict: Way more fun than the current data-viz standards…also maybe likely to come back in style??

For some good news: Here’s the climate progress made so far in 2022. Bet you can guess the first item in this list.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott thinks AI should be regulated
• The lightest and most abundant element could also be key to a net-zero future
• NASA is about to launch a CubeSat trial balloon for its moon mission reboot