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EV Battery Diagnostics: Aviloo & the EU Battery Passport · Deep Tech Germany – AI, Robotics & Frontier Innovation by Startuprad.io™

0:00
The battery is the most expensive single component in an
0:04
electric vehicle. It costs more than the entire engine
0:07
of a combustion car to replace. And until very
0:11
recently, no one, not the dealer, not the insurer, not the
0:15
buyer could tell you how healthy
0:18
it actually was. Not from a
0:21
trustworthy independent source. The car's own
0:25
computer gives you a number, but that number comes
0:29
from a software written by the same company selling you the
0:32
warranty. So here's the question. In a market where
0:36
single data point determines whether a €40,000
0:40
asset is worth buying or walking away from,
0:44
who do you trust? And why should that
0:47
be anyone other than the manufacturer?
0:51
What does it actually take to build an industry standard when the most
0:55
powerful players in the market the the car manufacturers hold
0:58
all the data, control the diagnostic software, and even
1:03
every financial incentive to keep it that way.
1:12
Welcome to Startuprad IO,
1:16
your podcast and YouTube blog covering the German
1:19
startup scene with news, interviews and
1:23
live events.
1:27
Aviloo Guillen Behr was founded in 2018 in
1:30
Wiedenoidorf, Austria by Wolfgang Berger and
1:34
Nicolaus Meyerhofer with a single thesis that the
1:37
EV battery market had no independent
1:40
manufacturer agnostic method of measuring battery
1:44
health. Since then the company has run over half a million
1:48
tests, built coverage across 96% of the EV
1:51
and plug in hybrid models on the market, expanded into
1:55
50 countries and established partnerships relationships
1:59
with organizations including mannheim Express Europe,
2:03
TUF, Adiac, Hyundai, Aaval and
2:06
Emil Frei. In December 2025, they
2:10
announced a US market entry via
2:13
partnership with Electrium, operating from a
2:17
Denver subsidiary in February 2026.
2:20
Just very recently, the close to 30 million euros strategic investment
2:25
led by Amira Growth with Investagi
2:29
participating to fund global scaling. Their estimated
2:32
enterprise value sits between 130 and 200 billion
2:36
US dollars. The battery passport, which will mandate
2:40
exactly the kind of data transparency Aviloo provides,
2:43
becomes compulsory in February 2027.
2:47
My guest today is Marcus Bager, CEO and partner at Aviloo
2:51
since 2020. Hello and welcome everybody to Startup
2:55
Radio, the podcast for the startup ecosystem and beyond. Today
2:59
we're speaking with the CEO of Avilooo Battery
3:02
Diagnostics, a company that has positioned itself at the
3:06
center of the most consequential trust problem in electric
3:09
vehicle transition. Servus Markus hello.
3:14
You came into Aviloo not as a founder but but as
3:18
an operator brought in to build a structure around an idea that was
3:22
already running. Let's start here, okay,
3:26
with pleasure. You spent nearly 20 years
3:30
running operations for some of the largest real estate businesses in
3:33
Central and Eastern Europe. CBRE EHL Acron
3:37
with a fund with 500 million euros in
3:41
assets, then you stop completely. Then you joined your
3:45
brother's EV startup. What actually made you
3:49
go back to work? Yeah, that's true. I
3:52
actually made my career in real estate, as you correctly pointed
3:56
out. Yeah. And after more than 20 years,
4:01
I came to a point where I kind of felt
4:04
exhausted. In parallel, I built
4:09
together with my wife, a large family. So we got five kids and I
4:12
was traveling a lot. And yeah,
4:16
age of 45, I just came, as I mentioned, to
4:20
the point where I felt like it's enough. I felt exhausted and
4:24
I needed a break. And I took that break.
4:27
And that was exactly the timing when my brother and Nico had this
4:31
idea of establishing Aviloo. And I still remember
4:35
it's Christmas 2019. My brother approached me and just asked me if you want to
4:39
join them. And as I had the opportunity to do something
4:43
totally new, I just took the risk
4:46
and did it. And now I'm here. I see he caught you over
4:50
drinks in a Christmasy mood.
4:53
Aviloo has already two years. Was already two years old when
4:57
you joined as the COO back in 2019. What was
5:01
the specific operational gap that needed to be filled
5:05
and what was already broken when you arrived?
5:09
Yeah, so the company was actually not three years old. It was more like
5:13
one and a half years. And it was nothing
5:17
broken. It was just like my brother told me, Look,
5:20
Marcus, you know, Nico and I, we book those technicians. We
5:24
understand a lot about technology, but, you know, we have financial matters to be
5:28
taken care. We have bills to be paid, we need financing.
5:31
You are a. A commercial guy. So my background is business administration.
5:36
Do you want to join us and let's do it together. And that was actually
5:40
their motivation to bring me on board.
5:44
The founding claim of your company is that no manufacturer
5:47
independent battery test existed
5:51
anywhere when you started in 2019.
5:55
That was a claim actually true,
5:58
or is it partly a positioning call?
6:02
No, it was absolutely true. And to be honest, it's still
6:06
true. We are still the only company
6:09
globally that provides an independent
6:13
battery analysis is state of health calculation. But actually our
6:17
diagnosis goes beyond pure state of health calculation.
6:20
We are still the only company that does this independent from
6:24
the OEM value.
6:28
Also interesting, you joined externally, but you took a meaningful
6:32
financial stake in the company. When you joined. You were betting on your own
6:35
capital on a hardware startup in a market that didn't
6:39
exist at scale. Who was
6:43
your logic that made that a reasonable bet
6:47
and what would have had to be true
6:51
to make it an unreasonable bet?
6:55
That's actually a good question. I mean, you're absolutely right. I made a
6:58
bet. I was 40 years, 45 years old
7:02
back then. I had five kids and a wife
7:06
to feed, so there were seven miles to be fed. And
7:10
obviously we didn't have any income in those
7:14
days, at the very early days of Avilooo, so we had to live off our
7:18
savings. And it was a risky decision. Absolutely. What
7:21
made me do it? I don't know. It wasn't a logic decision. It was,
7:25
I would say, in the end still the gut feeling decision. It was like now
7:29
or never. It's probably my last chance to do something like this and
7:33
I just dared to do it. And yeah, and here we are. I
7:37
think statistically speaking, the most successful entrepreneurs found the company
7:41
with 45 and I have two kids.
7:45
Completely ignoring what you have to achieve. What do you
7:49
have to do to be an entrepreneur with five kids?
7:54
Your flash test takes three minutes. Your
7:57
premium test your company offers takes
8:01
significantly longer. You choose to lead commercially with
8:04
a three minute version. What was the resource allocation behind
8:08
prioritizing speed over death?
8:12
Well, it was a logic decision. You know, we started off with the premium test.
8:16
That was our first product. And as you correctly mentioned, it's a very
8:19
sophisticated battery diagnostics. You know,
8:23
you discharge the car from 100% down to
8:27
below 10% state of charge. That takes quite
8:30
some time. Yeah. And you have to drive the car and we collect
8:34
a lot of data while doing so. And the product still exists and we
8:38
still sell it and we still love it because it provides us an
8:41
enormous amount of insight through data. But
8:45
obviously it doesn't fit into the processes of a car
8:49
dealer, of a leasing company, of an auction house. It just cannot drive a car
8:52
for 300 or 400 kilometers. So we
8:56
very quickly, back in those days then came to the
9:00
conclusion on the basis of the premium test data, we need to
9:04
provide the market with a quick test
9:08
in standstill mode. No driving, no charging, no
9:11
discharging required, and just plug in the box, wait three minutes,
9:15
get a proper state of health calculation. And that's actually the product that we
9:19
are selling today, that's the flash test.
9:25
According to your data, you cover 95,
9:29
96% of all EV and plug in hybrid models
9:33
on the market. What does it actually cost in terms of times
9:37
and resources to add a new vehicle to your system?
9:41
And what's the constraint that stops you from reaching
9:44
100%? Well, there
9:48
is substantial time and resources that goes
9:52
into, you know, working on the
9:56
communication through the obd, through the OBD interface,
10:00
communicating with the internal canvas of each vehicle.
10:05
Because, you know, the canvas protocols are not standardized. And a
10:09
Volkswagen or a BMW or a Tesla or
10:12
BYD has, uses totally different protocols. And our
10:16
job is, and we have a team of five people who do nothing else than
10:19
ensuring that that communication is working
10:23
properly. And their job is to ensure that we get the data
10:27
that we need out of each and every car.
10:31
And sometimes that means that we need the car
10:34
really physically here. Specifically when it's new
10:38
brands, such as new Chinese brands that come to Europe, we
10:42
want them, we need that car physically here to learn the
10:45
communication, to train our models, to
10:49
write respective software, and to be able to offer
10:52
that car into our clients. When
10:56
there are new models coming from existing
10:59
OEMs like Volkswagen, and you know, they follow the
11:04
campus protocols of the existing cars, like, for example, the
11:07
ID7 follows the protocols of the ID4 and the ID3,
11:11
but then it's comparably easier for us to do and we don't need the car
11:15
actually physically here in our offices, can do it remotely.
11:21
I see. And what is, what is preventing us from reaching 100%?
11:25
This is the, actually the scarce, scarce
11:29
models that just arrive from China, which don't have a
11:33
volume yet, where we didn't
11:37
prioritize yet to learn to communicate with
11:40
those cars, we will at a certain point of time when you mark market requires
11:43
it. But that's actually the gap between 95 and
11:47
100%.
11:53
Now, we'll get a little bit into the technical details because you have
11:57
stated publicly that a battery at 75% state
12:00
of health can still be perfectly good car.
12:04
Meaning it's as we said before, it's the most expensive part of the
12:08
car. The industry convention treats 80% as a
12:12
meaningful threshold. WHO benefits from the 80% rule
12:16
staying in place and who gets hurt by it?
12:21
Well, it's a good question. I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to
12:24
make a statement that I think someone would intentionally play with that
12:28
figures to his own benefit. I don't
12:32
believe that's actually true.
12:35
I personally think that it's,
12:40
it fully depends on, you know, on the individual
12:43
driving behavior. And when I say a car with 75, and I would even go
12:47
further and say even with 70%, maybe even with 65 or 60% state
12:51
of health is still a usable car
12:54
for specific people. You know, if you just say, okay, I just need a card,
12:58
you know, go to the supermarket maybe, okay, drive to my parents who
13:01
live 80 kilometers away, and that's it. So then you're
13:05
probably well off with a car. That has
13:09
70 or 60% state of has provided that there is no security,
13:13
no safety risk, which might be the case. But if that's not the case,
13:17
then you can buy a car. It should just be priced
13:21
adequately. You should get such a car much cheaper than
13:24
a similar car with 85 or 90% state of health.
13:28
And that's our job. Keep EVs in the market
13:32
for as long as possible and ensure
13:36
that you can make an educated decision. When buying a used
13:39
ev, you decide what you need and you go out and find a car
13:43
that exactly meets what you need and that might differ
13:47
from one person to another.
13:51
You increased Mannheim Express Europe,
13:55
so it's a used car online platform
14:00
there used EV sales conversion rate by more than a
14:03
third after introducing your certificate. Before your
14:07
certificate, what were they doing instead
14:11
and why was it failing? Well, yeah, those are figures
14:14
that Manheim publicly announces. So we are obviously quite proud
14:18
and, and also quite happy that it proves what we always said
14:22
is what consumers
14:25
who walk into a dealer's office
14:29
and spend, I don't know, 30 or 40k of their hard earned money
14:33
for a used. What they want to know is
14:37
they just want to be safe, they just want to be secure. They want to
14:40
know that their hard earned money spent well. And
14:44
an EV is practically a battery and a computer on
14:47
wheels. So the batteries, the decisive part is
14:51
the black box. And we bring transparency into that black
14:55
box. We would just make it publicly known
14:58
this vehicle has a state of health of X and this has a state of
15:01
health of Y percent. We have make your decision, price it
15:05
adequately and obviously those cars get sold much faster.
15:10
Because, you know, our clients like Manha Express, can provide
15:14
what their clients need, which is independent
15:19
diagnostics, which is safety, which is security. And that's what
15:22
clients want. And one
15:26
of the reasons you're here, you raised 30 million in February
15:29
2026. Congratulations, by the way. Primarily to expand
15:33
the United States and Asia. But the EV battery
15:37
passport becomes mandatory in almost a year
15:40
February 2027. Right now your strongest regulatory
15:43
tailwind is here in Europe, European Union. Which
15:47
market is the actual growth bet? The ones with
15:51
legal mandate or the ones without it?
15:55
Well, I think we are growing everywhere. So we have
15:58
an extremely large business in Europe, obviously, for
16:02
obvious reason. We're an Austrian company. We started off in Austria and in
16:06
Ger, Germany, and then expand it into
16:09
Scandinavia, Benelux, France, South Europe, East Europe.
16:13
So we have clients in every country in Europe
16:17
and many clients also outside of Europe. But the European business
16:21
provides us with a very strong financial foundation to allow us
16:25
to now expand into the US to expand into China.
16:29
We already have partners in Australia, in Korea, in Japan,
16:33
in Taiwan, in Brazil. So
16:38
everywhere where EVs are driving around, our product is available.
16:43
With this investment, you've taken capital from
16:46
Amira Growth, a firm with 5 billion
16:50
euros in assets under management. At what point does a
16:53
strategic investor of that scale start influencing
16:57
operational decision? And what is your answer when this starts
17:01
to happen? So
17:04
Amira, I mean we didn't just go for the first one,
17:08
you know, offering us a deal. And there were many
17:12
thanks God. Why we chosen Amira in the end was
17:15
because of their very hands on approach. A nice
17:19
and sympathetic team, you know, understanding what we're doing,
17:23
not believing that they know everything better, but on the other hand
17:27
providing a lot of expertise, providing a team that can advise us,
17:31
providing people that, that have been doing what we are
17:34
now doing for the first time in our lives. Meaning scaling up a business from
17:38
zero to triple digit million
17:42
revenues. So Amira, already the first couple of months
17:46
has been very helpful in helping us with our go to market strategies,
17:49
with working on our organizational chart with key hires
17:53
and so on and so forth. So they provide a lot of input. Except
17:56
for money. So not except for, I apologize additional. In addition to
18:00
money. In addition to money, that's also something I tell
18:04
everybody who's raising funds. You can't Simply
18:08
buy money. KPIs. You can ring the term
18:11
sheets. There has to be personal fit. There has to be competence in there as
18:15
well. I agree, I agree. Before the break,
18:19
if you have bought or sold a used electric vehicle
18:22
or if you're considering it, drop your question for Marcus in the comments.
18:26
We will address the best one in a future
18:30
potential episode. Right after the break, we'll get into
18:33
structured question. This entire market is standing around.
18:37
If the car manufacturers are forced to publish their own battery
18:40
health data by EU regulations next year, what is left for the
18:44
independent diagnostic company to actually sell?
18:53
The EU battery passport arrives in February 2027.
18:57
It will require OEM manufacturers to
19:01
report state of health data for every battery. If
19:04
that data is publicly available and legally standardized. What does
19:09
exactly avalu sell that the buyer cannot get
19:12
directly from the car's own communication?
19:17
Recurrent, your US competitor runs entirely without
19:21
hardware. They aggregate real world traffic
19:24
data through software integrations with no physical device
19:28
involved. Explain precisely why software alone
19:32
cannot do what your flash test does and
19:35
what measurement specifically requires your hardware
19:39
contact with the vehicle.
19:43
So I actually, I wouldn't support the statement that recurrent is our U.S.
19:46
competitor. I think Recurrent is a marketing support
19:50
company. They are by far not doing battery tests.
19:54
They are, I guess they tried, but they probably find out that it just
19:58
doesn't work without the hardware. They are connecting through
20:01
individual apps, getting some data out of it, but it
20:05
definitely doesn't give you any information about the battery.
20:09
So it just requires a
20:13
hardware and it will require hardware for quite some time to go. Why?
20:17
Because the cloud solutions that
20:20
OEMs have are
20:24
still comparably small. There would be
20:28
so much data that that the car producers that would have to go
20:32
into cloud solutions that there is hardly any company who is
20:35
able to do that at the moment. So
20:40
we need the hardware, we need the Avila box to connect
20:44
with the OBT interface. Exactly. To get out all the data that we need
20:48
in order to perform a proper battery test, to perform a premium test
20:52
or to perform a flash test. And this data is not available in
20:55
any OEM cloud that we know at least. And I think it won't
20:59
force many years to come.
21:02
But once that's the case, we would be more than glad to connect to that
21:06
cloud solutions and just do the same. Getting the data not directly out of
21:09
the car, but indirectly through an OEM cloud solution
21:13
would be perfect for us as well. Let me
21:17
put a little bit my skeptic hat on
21:20
looking at your business. The business world would say
21:24
most first generation E business EVs used EVs are still
21:28
covered by their OEM 80 warranty. So battery health
21:31
testing is a solution in search of a problem.
21:35
What would be your answer to that skeptic?
21:40
I believe that the question maybe results also in
21:43
a misunderstanding what we're doing. So we are
21:47
not here to discover OEM warranty cases. I
21:51
we do that permanently do that, but that's not the primary
21:55
goal. The primary goal is to bring transparency into battery performance
21:59
and also battery safety which are typically not covered by
22:03
OEM guarantees. So if you want to buy used the we and it
22:06
just makes a difference if you have one with 95% state of health or with
22:10
82% state of health, same age, same mileage, completely different
22:14
state of health. And state of health directly translates
22:18
into mileage, so your mileage just reduced substantially.
22:22
Both EVs wouldn't be a warranty case. But you might say okay, I
22:25
take the one with 95% because that's what I need. I just need to go
22:30
400 kilometers once every week and the 82%
22:34
car wouldn't deliver that. So for me it's not usable.
22:38
There are no warranty cases involved here. And still
22:41
you want to know. Because every percentage
22:45
difference in SOH reduces your mileage. Might
22:49
have additional impacts on fast charging, by the
22:52
way. And why would you pay the same amount
22:56
of Money for an 82% state of health Tesla? Like for a 95% state of
23:00
health Tesla, you wouldn't. So you would still want to know
23:04
regardless of OEM warranty topics.
23:10
An interesting thing we figured out is you,
23:14
your brother Wolfgang and co founder Nicholas are the three listed
23:17
managing directors in the Austin firm Bull.
23:21
How is your decision authority actually divided between you
23:25
three and what is the process if you disagree
23:29
on a significant operation operating decision? Because
23:32
there's a lot of entrepreneurs right now listening and maybe they
23:36
also have the same problem or maybe you have a good solution for them.
23:40
I don't know if I have a good solution. I mean,
23:44
yes, there are the three of us. We form the management board,
23:48
or let's say we form the formal management board.
23:51
What we also introduce is a senior management board that consists of
23:55
additional people in the company which would actually take the majority of the
23:59
decisions. So we just don't rely on the opinion of the three of us. We
24:02
include more senior people with more experience or
24:07
additional experience into any decision
24:10
making board. But it has just recently been established
24:14
over the first four or five years. You are right, we just
24:18
took the decisions, the three of us together. The good thing is, you
24:21
know, we've been knowing each other. We know each other for more than 30 years,
24:25
my brother and myself obviously. And also Nico is a
24:29
very good friend to both of us for 30 years. So we trust each other
24:33
and we have very different areas of
24:36
expertise. Where my brother is more a product sales guy, Nico is
24:40
a technician, I'm a hardcore finance
24:44
strategy guy. So we trust each other. If we have a technical
24:48
question to be answered, we would just trust Nico's assessment because
24:52
I don't know he knows. And while the others trust me when it comes
24:55
to maybe business decisions, strategic decisions, then they would say, okay Marcus,
24:59
you know best, we trust you. So we could limit
25:03
conflicts to an absolute minimum.
25:09
Also on your internal workings, I would be interested in
25:13
what's the single internal metric that tells you whether
25:16
Avilooo is on track in any given quarter
25:20
and at what threshold does a deviation in that
25:24
metrics forces you to
25:27
structurally respond. So thanks God we didn't have
25:31
that incident or the case that, you know,
25:35
we had to structurally respond to any kind of deviation
25:39
because we didn't have that. If we deviate, we just
25:43
deviate to the upside, which typically doesn't
25:47
force us for any response except for just letting it
25:51
run. We have metrics, of course. I mean,
25:56
we have our revenues coming in on a daily basis. So we track
26:00
the amount of battery tests, the amount of revenues that we generate.
26:04
It practically live. Yeah, we have a live
26:08
dashboard that would tell us in the hour, how many
26:12
battery tests have we sold today, for example, until
26:16
now it's I don't know, 11am we could tell you and we
26:20
could react instantly if we feel that something
26:24
would go wrong, which actually never happened.
26:28
So that's more or less, I think you need to have actual
26:31
data, ideally life data, specifically on revenues,
26:35
and then you can manage and run your company quite efficiently.
26:45
Your LinkedIn data, I mean, of the company abilo,
26:49
show that you grew headcount by 58% in the
26:53
last year. At what hiring pace does a company start
26:57
losing the operating properties that made it effective at a
27:01
smaller scale? And how do you actually detect that
27:04
before it becomes a problem? Yeah,
27:08
very good question. Yeah, I mean, we grow at
27:11
a substantial scale. And
27:15
of course, you know, finding those people, hiring those people is
27:19
a challenge. Onboarding those people is a challenge. And
27:23
you might easily make wrong decisions and go for
27:27
speed instead of quality. We
27:30
don't do that. We take hiring decision when we
27:34
are really convinced that that is the right person. And
27:39
what I'm doing, for example, I'm calling practically everyone
27:43
who sends us an interesting CV myself still
27:46
at that size of the company. And we have now, by the way, over
27:50
600 open applications in our system. It doesn't mean that I
27:54
call all the 600, but I would probably call 70 or 80
27:58
the most interesting. And I would explain them how Avil works, what's
28:01
in our DNA, what this person would have to expect if he or she
28:05
would join us. And that makes it quite transparent. And some say that's
28:09
exactly what I want. You know, this speed,
28:12
the dynamics, the performance orientation,
28:16
the nice atmosphere, the positive atmosphere.
28:20
And some would say, you know, probably not the right thing for me. You know,
28:23
I don't want to go into such a challenging environment. And it's also fine and
28:27
it's better to find out before you sign an employment agreement. So,
28:31
yeah, we are doing very well on the hiring front and
28:34
we are happy. But also to say we are now hiring for
28:38
the first time ahead of HR.
28:43
We are now almost 100 people and I think it's now time to put that
28:47
into professional hands.
28:51
You're expanding into the US market. We're simultaneously
28:54
running operations in 15 European markets. What is
28:58
one organizational decision you have
29:02
already made for the expansion in the US
29:06
that most European scale up playbooks would say is
29:09
wrong. And why did you make it anyway?
29:13
To be honest, Jorn, I don't know what
29:17
European scale up playbooks would suggest for the
29:20
us I can only tell what we did. We,
29:25
we established our business in the US actually more than a year ago and
29:29
my brother was taken care and then we hired a very experienced
29:32
salesperson. And
29:36
I think the learning that we took is that
29:41
it's not that easy, unfortunately. And we had hoped to get some spillover
29:44
effects with some large European clients such as Cox
29:48
Automotive or Mercedes. We can get an
29:52
easy entrance into the us we can start to work with them and then
29:55
everything happens more or less automatically.
29:59
Didn't exactly turn out that way. And so
30:03
we revised our strategy early this year and we
30:07
hired a CEO, a US based CEO,
30:11
whom we now hand over the responsibility to build our business
30:16
locally in the US because we also realized
30:19
it's actually very difficult to build a business in the US out of
30:23
Europe. That's at least our
30:27
experience. Can you name one
30:30
specific operating decision from your
30:34
first two years at Avilooo that you would reverse
30:38
today? Not like a general idea, the specific
30:42
decision, the assumption behind it, the evidence that proved it
30:45
wrong, and the rule he now operated buy
30:49
instead. To be honest, I mean, I thought about
30:53
that when you provided this
30:58
question to me and I didn't come,
31:01
I mean, unable to come up with any decision, any
31:05
substantial operating decision that I would, you know, do
31:09
differently today. I mean, obviously
31:12
there's a lot of smaller decisions or even bigger decisions that with the knowledge
31:16
from today we would do differently
31:20
if we had the opportunity. But at the time that we
31:24
took a decision, it was right. I mean, I'll give you an example. We started
31:27
off with a third party hardware with the data
31:31
logger. We said we are not a hardware company, we don't want to build our
31:34
own hardware. There are so many OBD dongles,
31:37
there's so many OBD hardware out there. It just takes one that
31:41
exists. And I think we tried for two years and it was
31:45
always a struggle. And after two years we said that we stop it and now
31:48
we build our own hardware, which we did. We designed our
31:53
boards and we are now writing the whole firmware
31:57
and we completely control the hardware now it's ours. And
32:00
it was a perfect decision. But it was also
32:04
the right decision 6 years ago not to do that because it wouldn't have
32:08
had the resources at those times. So it was right to say, let's try with
32:11
the third party hardware first and I probably would do it again.
32:16
But yeah, it was probably two years that we
32:20
lost in hardware development. For everyone
32:23
listening, if your founder who has had to kill a
32:27
product bet or reverse a major strategic
32:30
assumptions tell us what it was
32:34
in the comments. We want to build a real library
32:37
of these reversals. Now
32:42
we're getting very close to the end and I want you to make a falsifiable
32:45
prediction about the used car electric market
32:49
in 2028. Something
32:53
specific enough that we can return to this episode in two years
32:56
and judge whether you were right or wrong.
33:02
Difficult question. I would say
33:06
in 2028 you are not going to sell a used TV
33:10
without an independent. I bet there is a certificate attached to
33:14
would just be impossible. No used to we will be sold. If you
33:18
cannot prove the state of health of that specific car
33:22
via an independent third party
33:26
provider, you just not get buyers. That's my
33:29
prediction. We shall see
33:34
if I'm right. Also something
33:38
discussed over and over again. The dominant narrative
33:42
in the category is that the EV adoption is unstoppable
33:46
and your market growth with it. What is the
33:49
scenario in which this assumption is wrong and what does Aviloo look
33:53
like? If EV adoption stalls in the
33:56
next three to five years, how would the EV
34:00
adoption come to a standstill?
34:04
It's hard for me to imagine anything that happens in
34:08
order to come to that result. I mean,
34:13
I just don't see it.
34:17
Electro mobility or EVs is the
34:21
dominant technology. I mean if you have ever driven ev, it's very
34:24
difficult to go back into a diesel car. You feel like
34:28
you're going back a century in technology.
34:34
I agree. I mean at the beginning EV adoption was a political
34:39
there was a master plan behind and politics wanted that to happen and
34:43
put a lot of money in in order to make that happen.
34:46
And I wasn't entirely convinced that that
34:50
is the right thing to do because I think people have to take their
34:54
own decisions themselves without political
34:57
pressure. And some people even don't want
35:01
to be pressured. I think too much
35:05
political pressure would even put people away and say okay then I don't do
35:08
it because I don't want to get myself pressured into something. I'm by the
35:12
way such a person. The more pressure you put on me,
35:16
the more is the likelihood that I just won't do it by principle. But I
35:20
think that has stopped now and
35:24
many market participants very afraid that you don't know okay,
35:28
the it will crash, new EV sales will crash and they
35:31
crashed for let's say Six months or so and then they
35:35
fully recovered. And I think we are now in a far more stable environment.
35:39
Now. People are buying EVs not because they got so much
35:42
public funding for it. They are buying used EVs because they really
35:47
want to drive an EV. And
35:50
that's what I think is stable market
35:54
conditions. So I don't see anything happening that that would
35:57
reverse the trend. Yes. Given the current
36:01
gas prices here, I can also see the allure of an
36:05
ev. Let us close with our two mandatory
36:08
questions. Your capital posture. You just raised
36:12
money, but you're currently open to talk to new investors.
36:16
Well, we are not really in need on any new investors now. We're
36:20
happy with the situation that we are in, but we
36:24
always talk, we always listen. We always want to
36:27
remain in touch with the investment market and
36:31
also with Amira, by the way, we started our discussions two years before we
36:35
actually closed the deal. And two years from now.
36:38
Yeah, it's a long period of time. Many
36:42
things can happen. So we are always happy to talk with the potential
36:46
investors that want to talk with us.
36:50
And I think we've already talked a little bit about it. You,
36:54
you're still looking for talented people, right? Absolutely.
36:58
Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Wonderful.
37:03
Thank you, Markus, it was a pleasure talking to you. Best
37:06
of luck with your battery testing and the expansion
37:11
in Asia and the us thank you very much. Thank you very
37:14
much, Yan, for having me on your show. It was my pleasure. The pleasure was
37:18
all mine. Have a good day. Bye. Bye. Same to you. Bye. Bye.
37:26
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37:35
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