Remember when you and a handful of other fashion trailblazers were the only people wearing Crocs…until the floodgates opened and they were on everyone’s feet?

That moment could be here for electric vehicles in the US. EVs accounted for 5.6% of the total auto market in Q2, according to a new report from Cox Automotive. While that share is still pretty small, it carries major implications.

Why? Because 5% is the tipping point after which EVs skyrocket from niche → mainstream, according to a Bloomberg analysis of 19 countries. It happened in Norway in 2013, in China in 2018, and in South Korea in 2021. Five percent is apparently the threshold where people go from thinking “My neighbor has an EV…that’s odd” to “Three people on my street have EVs…I think I want one, too.”

This adoption pattern isn’t exclusive to electric vehicles—you see it play out across the tech industry. It’s called “the S curve”:

• When a new technology (such as TV or the internet) is first introduced, it’s only used by a small number of early adopters. Growth is relatively slow.
• But that growth accelerates in dramatic fashion once the normies catch wind (for EVs, the 5% mark).
• In the final stages of the S curve, growth once again stagnates as the holdouts hold out.

So will it happen in the US?

Let’s just play out the hypothetical: If the US follows the same EV adoption pattern as other countries that hit the 5% threshold, then a full 25% of new car sales would be electric by the end of 2025, per Bloomberg. That would smash forecasts by a year or two.

But to get there, the industry has to overcome a number of hurdles.

1. First, the cost. The average EV costs $66,000 in the US, which is $20k more than the average price for all new cars.
2. The lack of a dense fast-charging network is also hindering EV adoption in the US. In a recent survey, 61% of Americans who said they weren’t gung-ho about buying an EV cited the uncertainty around finding a charger.

Looking ahead…projects are underway to build more chargers across the fruited plain. The Biden administration will hand out $7.5 billion for electric charging infrastructure to states, while GM and Pilot announced a partnership yesterday that would increase the number of fast chargers available in the US by 20%.—NF

Italian PM gets denied trying to quit. After losing support from a key political ally, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi submitted his resignation yesterday. Just one problem: The country’s president rejected the resignation and told Draghi to get back to work trying to cobble together a majority. Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank, has held his position for 17 months, but discontent has been rising lately over a variety of issues; one topic Draghi lost support over was about trash in Rome.

Lifehack: X-ray all of your Van Goghs. While conducting an X-ray on a painting in preparation for an upcoming exhibition, experts at the National Galleries of Scotland discovered a previously unknown self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh hidden under cardboard and glued to the back of one of his other works. Like how your dad used to take down messages on any paper he could find, including your college application, Van Gogh—often strapped for cash—frequently utilized both sides of his canvases and occasionally painted over his own work.

Coors heads to Super Bowl LVII. Molson Coors, the maker of Coors Light and Miller Light, bought a 30-second Super Bowl ad, which doesn’t sound like a big deal, but…it kinda is. It means that, for the first time since Ronald Reagan was president, you’re going to see a beer commercial in the Super Bowl that’s not from Anheuser-Busch, which ended its 33-year exclusive partnership with the NFL.

There was a time when Google’s whole thing was search. Now that the company’s whole thing is, well, everything, some competitors are finding ways to chip away at the tech giant’s armor when it comes to looking things up online. The competition is forcing Google to make some changes to its most well-known service.

At Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference this week, Google exec Prabhakar Raghavan made the stunning admission that around 40% of Gen Z prefers searching via TikTok or Instagram over Google. Turns out when it comes to finding a lunch spot, young people are more interested in seeing @user17893490234’s fancam of its most aesthetic cocktails than a one-star Yelp review about its least-accommodating manager.

• Internal Google data also shows that around 55% of product searches start on Amazon, not Google.

Sensing weakness, investors are beginning to dip their toes in fresh competition. The customizable, ad-free search startup You.com announced yesterday that it raised $25 million in Series A funding, following a $20 million seed round last fall.

Google isn’t taking the threat lightly, either. To adapt to changing search expectations, the company is trying to improve search by implementing new features such as augmented reality and AI that helps lead users toward relevant video results (including on TikTok and Instagram).—MK

In between 30-second true crime explainers, you’ll now be able to watch TikTok content from Beyoncé. The only artist we’d let smash our car with a baseball bat joined the app yesterday and posted her first video: a fan compilation set to her new single, “BREAK MY SOUL.” We think people liked it! Beyoncé already has over 3.4 million followers on TikTok.

But…she has 268 million followers on Instagram, 15.5 million on Twitter, and 28 Grammy Awards. So what does she need TikTok for?

Beyoncé joining the platform shows that the music industry is fully embracing the app, Morning Brew social media creator Jack Appleby explained. It’s already vaulted countless songs to the top of the music charts and helped make stars of Olivia Rodrigo and Tai Verdes.

Dan Runcie, writer of the hip-hop business newsletter Trapital, told Morning Brew that “TikTok is the music industry’s new top of funnel” and for Beyonce to maintain her “omnipresence,” she needs to get her content in front of the app’s 1 billion monthly active users.

In addition to the promise of future videos, Beyoncé brought her entire music catalog to TikTok’s song library. Which is great, because we have a “Schoolin’ Life” dance that needs an audience.—MM

Stat: The average rental price for a Manhattan apartment topped $5,000 a month for the first time ever in June, per a report from Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel. NYC isn’t dead, it just wants you to be.

Quote: “I can say that Brittney has always been a very good teammate, so my role here is just to be with her, to support her. We miss her very much. We miss her energy.”

Evgeniya Belyakova, Brittney Griner’s teammate at Russian basketball club UMMC Ekaterinburg, appeared as a character witness on her behalf in Russian court yesterday. Belyakova and the team’s general manager, Maxim Ryabkov, are likely the first people Griner has come into contact with who she knows since she was arrested on drug charges in February, per ESPN.

Read: Meryl Streep’s one weird trick. (New York Times)

Long before gamers could lick flowers in Goat Simulator, RollerCoaster Tycoon set the gold standard for simulation games. By taking SimCity’s financial strategizing and combining it with the sheer joy of building a theme park from the cotton candy stand up, it became the bestselling PC game of 1999.

23 years later, the game still has a rabid fanbase and its players continue to push the boundaries of how pukey a park’s footpaths can get—not just because of nostalgia, but because the game itself is a hyperrealistic design marvel: Actual roller coaster engineers told the Brew they and their colleagues play it.

• RollerCoaster Tycoon was programmed by one designer, Chris Sawyer, over the course of two years almost entirely using a rudimentary coding language called x86 Assembly—a feat that still makes coders’ heads explode.
• The game was able to run its complex code on weak hardware with few bugs, and none that halted the gameplay.

And the final product didn’t just run smoothly on your family’s virus-infected IBM, it obeyed the laws of physics so precisely that one Redditor said, “The game wasn’t just a game, it was almost an Operating System.”

One example: A YouTuber made a coaster in 2019 that takes patrons over 800,000 in-game years to complete. Numerous other players have created similarly torturous and creative coasters in recent years…all in a game that Sawyer told The Ringer was “quite a big risk at the time” to release because it was considered too niche.—JW

The feeling of getting a 5/5 on the Brew’s Weekly News Quiz has been compared to getting a comment on your Twitter rant.

It’s that satisfying. Ace the quiz.

The archive you never asked for: The English-language manuals to every single Super Nintendo game. Dive in.

Back to Middle Earth: A new trailer dropped for Amazon’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series that’s set to debut on September 2.

Calling NYC retail leaders: We’re getting together on July 19 to network and discuss how brands can effectively drive growth in today’s landscape. Did we mention there’s a made-to-order coffee bar? Join us.

Give this investment a whirl: Blendid’s robotic food kiosks are whipping up deliciously fresh smoothies to serve a $4b addressable market. Next up: soups, salads, sandwiches, and more! Get in the mix today.*

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The latest addition to the Brewniverse is here: CFO Brew. CFO Brew tackles the ever-changing, expansive world of global finance and serves up the news corporate finance pros need to know in a quick, witty format.

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This editorial content is supported by Oracle NetSuite.

You are going to absolutely hate us for today’s puzzle, but we’re here to be feared, not loved. It comes from the depths of Reddit, and it’s quite genius.

On Business Casual, Nora talks to Hype House creator and TikTok star Alex Warren about how he mastered the algorithm, his newfound wealth, and the hard lessons he learned about personal finance. Listen or watch here.

For more from the Brew:

What the smish? Phishing attacks are now invading our text messages. Here’s how IT departments can fight back.

Confused about bear markets? Don’t worry, we break down the definition of a bear market and how it will impact your wallet. Watch now.

Eritrea. The key to solving this puzzle is to incorporate the planets of the Solar System in order. You take each planet’s name, subtract all the letters in the first word of the “Condition,” mash the leftover letters with the second word in the “Condition,” and rearrange them to form a country.

So for Eritrea, take “Neptune” and subtract “unpen” to get “te.” Put that together with “airer” and unscramble to get Eritrea.