FT Alphaville presents: the burst EV bubble

Back in early 2021, former Alphavillain Jamie Powell (sob) unveiled FT Alphaville’s Electric Vehicle Bubble Watch, a continually updated Google Sheets spreadsheet that mapped the share prices and financials of the bubbly EV space.

It’s fair to say the bubble has now burst. Behold, FT Alphaville’s Electric Vehicle Bubble-Deflation Watch spreadsheet.

Even after a pretty powerful rebound in many shitcos EV company stocks over the past month, the aggregate market cap losses for the 45 manufacturing, charging and battery companies since their 52-week high comes to more than $700bn at pixel time.

To be fair, the overall EV space is still valued at $1.34tn, largely thanks to Tesla’s massive $925bn market cap. Depending on your point of view, that could either mean there is more air to come out, or shows the enduring value of hot new cleantech.

Sadly, the original J-Pow has now left us, so aside from the automatically updated share prices, his spreadsheet has languished. As you can see from the note at the top, the last earnings numbers update happened on March 10.

We’ve manually plugged in the relevant stock data for Electric Last Mile to get the aggregate market cap drop, after ELM’s bankruptcy borked Google Finance/Sheets. But we haven’t had capacity to plug in all new earnings numbers, financials etc, and it otherwise remains as Jamie left it.

But during the past few months we have continually been pinged by FTAV readers who still want access to the Google doc, so we thought we would try something:

We are now reopening it up to everyone as an open-source spreadsheet and asking the people in our awesome little community to chip in and update the manual bits (eg debt, sales etc) to make sure it is of enduring value to us all.

So if you have asked to access it before and only received radio silence, apologies. You can now enjoy it at leisure. If you want to be able to edit it rather than just see it, please request editing access and include a line explaining why you’d be a good steward of one of Jamie’s main FTAV legacies (aside from a grudging overfamiliarity with Tarkovsky’s oeuvre).

We’re spitballing here, but shade things that has been updated in light blue and make a note of when in the notes column, so we can see what is up to date?

And feel free to sign your name the cells at the bottom, and claim credit on LinkedIn. This is the kind of heroic work that recruiters love to see.