2 charts and 6 data snacks for you today:
Voltswagen
No, we didn't come up with that one. Voltswagen was the actual new name (for about 24 hours) that automotive giant Volkswagen Group announced for their US subsidiary this week, in a bid to promote the company's renewed focus on electric vehicles and its new all-electric SUV.
Initially leaked as an upcoming April Fools joke, the name change was later confirmed on official VW corporate channels, before company spokesman Mark Gillies said on Tuesday that the statement was indeed an early April Fool’s Day joke. For a company found guilty of lying in a big way about emissions (Dieselgate), this was a high-risk gag and the delivery was poor.
Joke or not (we actually don't mind the name), VW Group is a lot more serious about its ambitions for electric vehicles. Last year, between the company's 12+ brands (full list of them here) the group delivered around 230,000 all-electric vehicles. That might only be around 2% of Volkswagen Group's total vehicle deliveries, but it is already almost half of Tesla's sales.
The road ahead
VW Group expects to spend €35bn ($41bn) on electric mobility over the next 5 years. With 12 individual brands to manage there's a decent chance they mess something up as they transition to electric, but even accounting for some serious execution risk, that kind of investment could see Volkswagen Group become the biggest EV seller in the world.
As vaccination programmes around the world gather steam, they appear to be reducing not just COVID cases, but vaccine scepticism itself.
In October of last year an IPSOS poll in 14 countries found a significant amount of scepticism about taking vaccines. A more recent poll, from the end of February, has found that in 10 of those 14 countries, the proportion of people that agree they would get a COVID-19 vaccine were it available has gone up. In some cases, such as Italy and Spain, quite substantially so.
In the UK, where more than half of the adult population has now had a vaccine dose, 87% of those polled would now agree to a vaccine, up from 79% in October, before the vaccine drive began. In the US, the change in attitudes has been modest, up just 1 point.
Je suis (still) sceptique
In France just 54% of those polled "agreed" that they would get a COVID vaccine, were it available back in October. The latest poll has seen that number increase to 59%, but it still leaves France as the most vaccine-sceptic of the 14 polled.
1) Food delivery platform Deliveroo has debuted on the London Stock Exchange, completing the company's IPO. Shares fell more than 30% in early trading.
2) Japan's famous cherry blossom trees have flowered particularly early this year. Beautiful data viz from The Economist, plotting the cherry blossom flowering back more than 1000 years.
3) Robotics company Boston Dynamics has unveiled its latest robot — called Stretch — which they claim can move up to 800 boxes an hour, with weights up to 23kg (50lbs).
4) The NFT crypto craze continues. NBA Top Shot, the animated trading card platform, has just raised $300m at a $2.6bn valuation.
5) George R. R. Martin has just signed a 5-year, 8-figure (that's $10m+) deal with HBO to develop "several" TV series. Martin is also reportedly involved in a stage adaptation as well. That should all keep him busy enough to not finish his original Game of Thrones book series: A Song of Ice and Fire.
6) Gallup has released the results from its latest survey on church memberships, and it reveals that for the first time US members of churches, synagogues or mosques are in the minority, with just 47% of respondents a member of a place of worship.
