In January 2021, General Motors introduced BrightDrop—its B2B electric vehicle brand—and a deal with FedEx.

This January, at CES, the automaker revealed that Walmart has also agreed to reserve 5,000 of its light-duty electric vehicles, which will start hitting the road in 2023. And last month, BrightDrop delivered the first five EV600 vans to FedEx—the fastest GM has ever brought a vehicle to market.

With BrightDrop, GM is targeting a market that is set for rapid electrification: fleets.

• More than 8 million of the nearly 270 million cars, trucks, and vans on the road in the US were part of a fleet in 2020, according to the Department of Transportation.
• Capturing light-duty EV business means GM has an opportunity to bolster its fleet sales, which have accounted for 12%–16% of total vehicles sold annually over the last five years.

“Execution is huge. The combination of being able to be very entrepreneurial, and fast moving as a separate company, but having the behemoth global powerhouse of engineering, infrastructure, and production capabilities of GM just makes us incredibly unique,” Steven Hornyak, chief revenue officer at BrightDrop, told Emerging Tech Brew.

Fleet power

Also at this year’s CES, FedEx announced that it has ordered an additional 2,000 EV600s from BrightDrop and is discussing an agreement for up to 20,000 of the delivery vans over the next decade. Verizon also plans to buy the smaller EV410 model from BrightDrop when it joins the lineup in 2023.

• GM has not publicly shared pricing for the electric vans yet. For some context, Ford’s E-Transit van starts at about $45,000.

“We see 2022 as being the year of the infrastructure, and the testing, and the foundation, on the commercial side. And then, 2023 as the beginning of an aggressive ramp [up], and in 2024, it’s literally going to be almost vertical in adoption,” Hornyak said.

Competitors are also working to capture business from commercial fleet owners. For example, Ford plans to deliver its new E-Transit to customers this year, and reported more than 24,000 reservations for the cargo van last August. UK startup Arrival struck a deal with UPS for 10,000 electric vans by 2024, and Amazon plans to buy 100,000 of Rivian's electric delivery vans by 2030.

Big picture: Converting the trucks and vans that move goods around will help to decrease hard-to-tackle Scope 3 greenhouse-gas emissions—a goal that’s become even more urgent as e-commerce sales are estimated to have grown by nearly 50% over the last two years.

Click here to read the full story.—GD

For the first time ever, doctors have transplanted a genetically modified pig heart into a human.

The University of Maryland Medical Center announced the successful transplant on Monday, and said the patient was doing well (three days post-surgery). Similar animal-to-human transplants—called xenotransplantation—have almost all eventually failed due to rejection of the organs. That could still happen here, despite the promising start.

But, but, but: This time, scientists used the heart of a pig that had undergone gene editing to eliminate a sugar believed to cause rapid organ rejection in humans.

A regenerative medicine company called Revivicor provided the modified heart for this operation, after receiving FDA approval for its genetically engineered pigs in December 2020.

If the name (and story) sound familiar, it’s because in October, Revivicor developed a genetically modified pig kidney that was successfully transplanted into a person for the first time.

• Revivicor is owned by biotech firm United Therapeutics, which purchased it for $7.6 million in 2011.
• In 2003, Revivicor was spun out from PPL Therapeutics—a UK-based company that was the first to clone a mammal (remember Dolly the sheep?).

For its part, United Therapeutics considers “organ manufacturing and transplantation”—including xenotransplantation, but also 3D-printing of organs—to be one of its five therapeutic platforms that will lead “to significant revenue growth over the medium and longer term.”

• The company made $445 million in Q3 2021, up from $380 million in Q3 2020, and is profitable.

Big picture: Xenotransplantation has been criticized by both bioethicists and animal rights groups, but if it works it would make it easier for patients to recieve vital organ transplants.

Click here to read the full story.—DM

Big bus news this week: Gillig, one of North America’s top bus manufacturers teamed up with RR.AI, which develops autonomous driving systems.

The goal: The new partners will develop commuter buses with driver-assistance systems and self-driving tech. The company says it plans to roll out the new features to all its buses, but its latest electric model will be first in line for the upgrade.

Gillig was founded in 1890 to make horse-drawn carriages and has worked with major transit agencies across the US since then.

• One recent example: In May 2021, it announced a $44 million deal to deliver at least 44 electric buses to the Utah Transit Authority.

Let’s get down to business

RR.AI is the commercial arm of Robotic Research, a self-driving and robotics company that specializes in military tech—and is responsible for 80+ “fully unmanned” trucks currently in operation, according to the company.

• Gillig’s parent, Henry Crown and Company, participated in Robotic Research’s $228 million Series A funding round, which was announced last month. Cue the strategic partnership.

The two companies have their sights set on Level 4 autonomy for the new commuter buses, meaning the tech can operate independently in select situations, such as driving in a bus yard or transit depot. That’s significantly more autonomy than Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving,” which is considered Level 2, or “partial autonomy.”

As for the driver-assistance systems, they’ll include features like “automatic emergency braking [and] precision docking…in addition to blind-spot detection and pedestrian avoidance.”

Click here to view on-site.—HF

Stat: About 100 people who had worked on Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented reality headset have left the company over the last year, with at least 40 going to Meta. Microsoft reportedly currently has ~1,500 people working on the project.

Quote: “I am feeling absolutely elated. We are now all part of history as we watch this magnificent machine getting ready to explore the Universe.”— Antonella Nota, the European Space Agency’s project scientist for the James Webb Telescope

Read: The truth about the crypto-mining software Norton Antivirus reportedly installed on computers.

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The much-buzzed about low-latency next-generation wireless network—5G—has been in the news quite a bit recently. How much do you know about the wireless standard?

Click here to take the quiz.

Buckle up, folks—it’s time to check in on the 2021 US patent leaderboard.

First, the top 10: IBM (8,682), Samsung (6,366), Canon (3,021), TSMC (2,798), Huawei (2,770), Intel (2,615), Apple (2,541), LG Electronics (2,487), Microsoft (2,418), Qualcomm (2,149).

• Except for Huawei, which was basically even, all of these companies received slightly fewer patents in 2021 than in 2020.
• Huawei moved up four spots on the leaderboard year over year, and TSMC moved up two. Microsoft dropped five spots.

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

• How a 21-year-old AI company just became a unicorn
• John Deere thinks its self-driving tractor can help feed the world
• A brief intro to CES 2022