The climate investor who bet right on ExxonMobil on how to stay ahead of the market for the next decade
A view of the Exxon Mobil refinery in Baytown, Texas.
Jessica Rinaldi | Reuters
Jennifer Grancio was among the leaders at Engine No. 1, the upstart investing firm focused on climate and energy transition, that bested ExxonMobil in a 2021 proxy contest upset few saw coming. What Engine No. 1 decided to do next was maybe as surprising: move away from the activist investor approach that worked so well in winning board seats at the oil and gas giant.
Now CEO, Grancio doesn’t want the firm to be defined by the Exxon headline, but rather by a long-term investing approach that is a blueprint for how companies should think about huge systems changes like energy transition, and how investors should access the value that will be created by the companies that get it, and scale transformed businesses.
“Investing is something you can do for the very short-term, but for the vast majority of asset owners … they are all looking for performance over time,” Grancio said at the CNBC ESG Impact virtual event on Thursday. “The market can get confused about investing only for ideology or the extremely short-term, but Engine No. 1 is going deep with companies, looking primarily at the business model and how it will need to change over time to create value for shareholders.”
The ExxonMobil campaign does hit on the big themes: having the right governance in place to see companies through big systems changes, making the right investments and avoiding the wrong ones. “We got into Exxon as an investor because we knew if it is smart and has the right management for energy transition and how the business is valued after energy transition, that will be great for shareholders,” she said. “We think of the ExxonMobil campaign as being about governance and long-term capitalism,” she said.
Grancio shared a few of her foundational ideas for investing in the future and staying ahead of the market at ESG Impact.
Lots of technology, but not tech stocks
“As investors, we like to talk about Google and Amazon, but where the returns will really be generated in the next decade, we look to agriculture, autos and energy,” Grancio said.
Engine No. 1 is doing a lot of work with autos, which it has been public about, including an investment in GM, on what she describes as a long term transition.
“People know about Tesla, but they forget about GM and Ford,” Grancio said.
“We will have this huge transition and it needs scale, and that’s millions and millions of cars and there is huge room for incumbents like GM and Ford to be part of creating and meeting all of this demand,” she said. This doesn’t mean Tesla won’t be a winner, she added, but GM and Ford also will be, Grancio said.
Don’t just be an index fund investor
Engine No. 1 has a passive index ETF — Grancio was among the senior leaders of the BlackRock iShares ETF business before joining Engine No. 1 — but she warns investors that in the same way they may focus on Tesla and forget about the rest of the auto sector, they will miss out on big investment opportunities if they stick with the index portfolio weightings.
“If you leave your money in a passive index fund, or you only buy the super-growth stocks, you will have a huge problem in your portfolio,” she said. “Investors are underweight the big transition ideas if they are in the indexes,” she added.
Grancio said holding the market in an index fund allows investors to use their shareholder voting power to drive outcomes, which it did by banding together with many large institutional shareholders to take on Exxon, but many of the biggest transition plays, from energy to transportation, are underweights for the majority of investors because of index fund use.
Another big example she cited is agriculture, and a company that she said is getting it right: Deere. “It makes tractors and tractors are dirty, but if we flip that and think about impact and the global food crisis and solving it, Deere’s moves into precision ag are better for climate and yield and financial performance of farmers,” she said. Deere is building a business to solve a huge systemic problem which also has an impact investing perspective, she said.
Still investing in big oil, and expecting energy transition to take a ‘little longer’
Grancio says that Engine No. 1’s work with Exxon is a sign that ESG investing works. “Look at the appreciation of different companies in energy and Exxon has more than doubled, significantly higher than peers, and it wasn’t just the price of oil,” she said.
She also cited Oxy (formerly Occidental Petroleum) which has been a leader in the energy transition space and has more than doubled in 2022 “because it is different from peers,” she said. “We believe these are fundamentally investment issues,” she added. Another important factor that made Oxy different from peers: a massive investment made by Warren Buffett in the company.
Engine No. 1 continues to be an active owner of energy companies, working on many of the same issues that it did at Exxon even if not through a proxy war: managing capital allocation, setting clear targets on emissions, and investing in green energy business.
But she says that the last year during which the price of oil spiked as a result of the war in Ukraine and critical energy shortages in Europe were exposed does mean that the energy transition “will probably be a little bit longer.”
“People use fossil fuels and we have not made this transition, and if we need fossil fuel assets we need them to be managed by the biggest companies in a way that is also looking at new technologies to maintain value after the transition, when we will be more in need of renewables and carbon capture,” she said.
That’s why she continues to see big energy companies as an investment opportunity. “They know how to do these things at scale. We need to deliver energy to the world today, but as we get to the other side of the energy transition, how they deal with these issues will be required for them to still have a great business,” she said. “We think there is a lot of room to work constructively with companies on these issues.”
US reshoring of manufacturing should be a new focus
While it does not fit neatly into an ESG box like climate, Grancio said one of the biggest investment opportunities in the future that she is chasing will be American companies in manufacturing, transportation and logistics tied to a huge resurgence in domestic production and manufacturing.
“Investors are not holding railroads, not assuming cars or chips will be made in the U.S.,” she said.
On Thursday, President Biden touted a plan by IBM to invest $20 billion in New York-based chip manufacturing, two days after Micron Technology announced up to $100 billion in semi manufacturing investments in the state.
Without providing details, she said Engine No. 1 will be creating an investment in the future around the opportunity to invest in the U.S. supply chain. “We’ll be doing something,” she said.
The U.S. domestic manufacturing revival is, in a sense, form of “systems change,” as globalization of prior decades is disrupted. And that fits Engine No. 1’s overall discipline. “We really think you have to understand systems and companies at a deep level to make good choices. Investing should never be ideological. It should be about understanding these companies and how industries are changing,” she said. And at a time of serious political blowback against ESG investing focused primarily on energy companies and climate change, she added, “Hopefully, we don’t let theater get in the way on this.”
Tesla has been forced to reimburse a customer’s Full Self-Driving package after an arbitrator determined that the automaker failed to deliver it.
Tesla has been promising its car owners that every vehicle it has built since 2016 has all the hardware capable of unsupervised self-driving.
The automaker has been selling a “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) package that is supposed to deliver this unsupervised self-driving capability through over-the-air software updates.
Almost a decade later, Tesla has yet to deliver on its promise, and its claim that the cars’ hardware is capable of self-driving has been proven wrong. Tesla had to update all cars with HW2 and 2.5 computers to HW3 computers.
In January 2025, CEO Elon Musk finally admitted that HW3 also won’t be able to support self-driving and said that Tesla will have to upgrade the computers. 6 months later, Tesla has yet to communicate a plan for retrofits to owners.
Tesla is now attempting to deliver its promise of unsupervised self-driving on HW4 cars, which have been in production since 2023-2024, depending on the model. However, there are still significant doubts about this being possible, as the best available data indicate that Tesla only achieves about 500 miles between critical disengagements with the latest software on the hardware.
The situation is creating a significant liability for Tesla, which already needs to replace computers in millions of vehicles, and it may need to do so in millions more.
On the other hand, many customers are losing faith in Tesla’s ability to deliver on its promise and manage this computer retrofit situation. Some of them have been seeking to be reimbursed for their purchase of the Full Self-Driving package, which Tesla sold from $8,000 to $15,000.
A Tesla owner in Washington managed to get the automaker to reimburse the FSD package, but it wasn’t easy.
The 2021 Model Y was Marc Dobin and his wife’s third Tesla. Due to his wife’s declining mobility, Dobin was intrigued about the FSD package as a potential way to give her more independence. He wrote in a blog post:
But FSD was more than hype for us. The promise of a car that could drive my wife around gave us hope that she’d maintain independence as her motor skills declined. We paid an extra $10,000 for FSD.
Tesla’s FSD quickly disillusioned Dobin. First, he couldn’t even enable it due to Tesla restricting the Beta access through a “safety score” system, something he pointed out was never mentioned in the contract.
Furthermore, the feature required the supervision of a driver at all times, which was not what Tesla sold to customers.
Tesla doesn’t make it easy for customers in the US to seek a refund or to sue Tesla as it forces buyers to go through arbitration through its sales contract.
That didn’t deter Dobin, who happens to be a lawyer with years of experience in arbitration. It took almost a year, but Tesla and Dobin eventually found themselves in arbitration, and it didn’t go well for the automaker:
Almost a year after filing, the evidentiary hearing was held via Zoom. Tesla produced one witness: a Field Technical Specialist who admitted he hadn’t checked what equipment shipped with our car, hadn’t reviewed our driving logs, and didn’t know details about the FSD system installed on our car, if any. He hadn’t spoken to any sales rep we dealt with or reviewed the contract’s integration clause.
There were both a Tesla lawyer and an outside counsel representing Tesla at the hearing, but the witness was not equipped to answer questions.
Dobin wrote:
He was a service technician, not a lawyer or salesperson. But that’s who Tesla brought to the hearing. At the end, I genuinely felt bad for him because Tesla set him up to be a human punching bag—someone unprepared to answer key questions, forced to defend a system he clearly didn’t understand. While I was examining him, a Tesla in-house lawyer sat silently, while the company’s outside counsel tried to soften the blows of the witness’ testimony.
He focused on Tesla’s lack of disclosure regarding the safety score and the fact that the system does not meet the promises made to customers.
The arbitrator sided with Dobin and wrote:
The evidence is persuasive that the feature was not functional, operational, or otherwise available.”
Tesla was forced to reimburse the FSD package $10,000 plus taxes, and pay for the almost $8,000 in arbitration fees.
Since Tesla forces arbitration through its contracts, it is required to cover the cost.
Electrek’s Take
This is interesting. Tesla assigned two lawyers to this case in an attempt to avoid reimbursing $10,000, knowing it would have to cover the expensive arbitration fees – most likely losing tens of thousands of dollars in the process.
It makes no sense to me. Tesla should have a standing offer to reimburse FSD for anyone who requests it until it can actually deliver on its promise of unsupervised self-driving.
That’s the right thing to do, and the fact that Tesla would waste money trying to fight customers requesting a refund is really telling.
Tesla is simply not ready to do the right thing here, and it doesn’t bode well for the computer retrofits and all the other liabilities around Tesla FSD.
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Environment
BYD says its about to launch the ‘largest-scale’ smart driving software update in history
After hitting a major milestone on Monday, BYD claimed it’s about to unleash “the largest-scale smart driving OTA in history.”
BYD preps for the largest-scale software update
BYD announced on Weibo that there are now over 1 million vehicles on the road with its God’s Eye smart driving system.
The milestone comes after it upgraded 21 of its top-selling vehicles with the smart driving tech in February, at no extra cost. Even its most affordable EV, the Seagull, which starts at under $10,000 (69,800 yuan), got the upgrade.
BYD didn’t reveal any specifics, only promising “it is safer and smarter.” The Chinese EV giant has three different “God’s Eye” levels: A, B, and C.
The highest, God’s Eye A, is typically reserved for BYD’s ultra-luxury Yangwang brand, which utilizes its DiPilot 600 smart cockpit with three LiDARs.
God’s Eye B is used for other luxury and higher-end models, including those under Denza, which utilize DiPilot 300 and one or two LiDARs.
The base God’s Eye C system, used for BYD brand models, includes 12 cameras, five wave radars, and 12 ultrasonic radars, all supported by DiPilot 100.
Last week, BYD’s luxury off-road brand, Fang Cheng Bao, launched a limited-time offer for Huawei’s Qiankun Intelligent Driving High-end Function Package. The discount cuts the price from 32,000 yuan ($4,500) to just 12,000 yuan ($1,700).
After selling another 382,585 vehicles in June, BYD now has over 2.1 million in cumulative sales in the first half of 2025, up 33% from last year.
With the “largest-scale smart driving” update coming soon, BYD’s vehicles are about to gain new functions and safety features. Check back soon for more details.
BYD claims it’s “capable of leading the transformation and popularization of intelligent driving” with over 5,000 engineers dedicated to the field. As the world’s largest NEV maker, BYD said it’s committed to transforming the auto industry with safer and more sustainable solutions for global markets.
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Kia’s electric SUV is a hit in the UK. The EV3 was the most popular retail EV through the first half of 2025, pushing Kia to become the UK’s third top-selling car brand so far this year.
Kia EV3 leads as the UK’s most popular retail EV
The EV3 is Kia’s fastest-selling EV in the UK and a massive part of the brand’s success this year. Kia said the compact electric SUV contributed to its best-ever June, Q2, and first half EV registrations so far this year.
In January, the EV3 “started with a bang,” racing out to become the UK’s most popular retail EV. The EV3 was the best-selling retail EV in the UK and the fourth best-selling EV overall in the first quarter, including commercial vehicles.
Through the first half of the year, the Kia EV3 maintained its crown as the UK’s most popular EV with 6,293 registrations.
The EV3 starts at £33,005 ($42,500) as the ‘brand’s most affordable EV yet.” It’s available with two battery packs: 58.3 kWh or 81.48 kWh, providing a WLTP range of up to 430 km (270 miles) and 599 km (375 miles), respectively.
Kia sold 31,643 electrified vehicles in the first half of 2025. Although this includes fully electric vehicles (EVs), plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), and hybrids (HEVs), it still accounts for over half of Kia’s total of 62,005 registrations.
After opening orders for the EV4 last week, Kia’s first electric hatchback, the brand expects to see even more demand throughout 2025. With up to 388 miles WLTP range, it’s also the longest-range Kia EV to date.
Next year, Kia will introduce the entry-level EV2, which will sit below the EV3 in Kia’s lineup. Kia is looking to add an even more affordable EV to sit below the EV2. It will start at under $30,000 (€25,000), but we likely won’t see it until closer toward the end of the decade.
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