> PowerCo will use the prismatic unified cell architecture in its batteries which allows for use of different cell chemistries. The cells will be manufactured from 2025 with the factory planned capacity to be 40 GWh which is enough to supply 500,000 electric vehicles. By 2030 PowerCo plans to have all six European factories up and running with a combined capacity of 240 GWh. The unified prismatic cell harnesses synergy effects and can offer manufacturing savings of up to 50% when compared to current batteries.
Why can't journalists use units correctly? I'm assuming the above is per year (but who knows?).
Side remark: it's actually kind of cool that you can literally specify the battery output of these factories in Watts.
Battery production is measured in Wh per year because you care about capacity to store energy. 40GWh = 40,000,000 kWh / (80kWh per car) = 500,000 cars.
Saying that the production capacity is 40GWh is like saying that a factory can produce a thousand cars. And then you are asking: Per week? Per year? In total?
"20 MPG is about 0.1 square millimeters," according to https://what-if.xkcd.com/11/. "If you took all the gas you burned on a trip and stretched it out into a thin tube along your route, 0.1 square millimeters would be the cross-sectional area of that tube."
It is, but that doesn't necessarily make it easier to use. If you have a factory producing batteries totaling x Wh/yr in capacity and every car needs a battery with capacity y Wh, then you can build x/y cars per year. The calculation is mathematically the same if the production is specified as z W (where z = x / 8766), but not as immediately obvious to understand.
Watts are an instantaneous measurement, but the factory needs a higher output most of the time to cover downtime. Much like power plants you would say it’s capacity is X watts with an expected capacity factor of Y%.
You could say the output is expected to average X watts over a year, but to then use it for anything would mean converting that to Wh.
I mean, Watts are a unit. All of the things you are saying are important considerations when discussing the factory's pattern of output, but ultimately, as you point out, it is still valid to measure the average output in Watts, which is the point that is being made, that that's the dimension that quantity has; you can still write down an equation of dimensioned quantities even if real-world complications mean that the equation is not as meaningful as one would like!
If you’re describing the W output though you could be describing the average [charge in each battery (W*h) X the number of batteries / time period] . That’s the actual W output of the factory as actual energy.
Capacity created per time period is a different unit created as a discrete entity with each battery but having no instantaneous value.
That's not what a unit is. A unit is just a standard against with other quantities sharing the same dimension can be measured. Anything with dimensions of energy/time can be measured in Watts, not just instantaneous power in the usual sense. Whether comparing two such quantities is meaningful may, as you point out, be another matter, but they can still be expressed in Watts.
Watt is power, Watt hour is energy. 1 Watt hour is 3600 joules, which looks suspiciously like 1 joule = 1 Watt second.
Most batteries now advertise energy capacity in kWh or thousand Watt hour(s). 1 kWh would be 3,600,000 joules or 3.6 megajoules, which does honestly sound more badass.
In the past batteries would advertise capacity in Amp hours, but you have to know the voltage of the battery to convert Amp hours to energy.
The rate of production can’t be specified using energy, it needs to be the time derivative of it (unless the overall output of the factory from being opened to being closed is specified, which I don’t think is the case in the article). The unit needs to describe - power.
Whether you use Joules or horse power weeks is beside the point as they can easily be converted into each other.
Sure thing my dude. You also cannot express fuel consumption in miles per gallon. You must express it in square millimeters. https://what-if.xkcd.com/11/
We may occasionally write gallons per mile with a slash, but it is useful as a ratio, not an equation. It makes no sense to reduce a volume to a surface.
On the other hand, knowing if a factory puts out 240 gigawatt hours worth of battery capacity every year, or only over the entire lifetime of the factory, really is an important distinction to make.
Sure, but to be useful you need flow rate, at which point you're basically back to calculating volume. Gas is purchased in volume, and stored in volume. Why not keep the measurement of use as volume per time or distance?
I wish people like you who make these intelligent,factual, and short comments could have a reputation value on HN. This value could give you some automatic upvotes or a more prominent location displayed.
It is usually accepted per year when not specified. For example when you talk about GDP, it is yearly. Salary? Yearly usually yearly unless specified. Factory production? Yearly.
And no, you cannot use watts, unless you invent a new unit, watts of capacity?
That's a very uniquely English thing. Where I'm from(Poland) you always list the salary per month and that's how people talk about it. I've never seen anyone refer to a salary on an annual basis.
> Where I'm from(Poland) you always list the salary per month and that's how people talk about it.
Depends on the type of contract. I'm also from Poland and unit I use most often is the daily rate because it's the only reliable way for a contractor to calculate earnings.
Job listings indeed still use monthly, but their understanding of a month is usually "20 workdays", which is obviously off by at least 10%.
You can thank our people’s republic past for that. In the whole bloc and the USSR, monthly has been the standard. It just carried over.
(Troubled post-socialism past and, to some extent, present, in which the vast majority is living paycheck to paycheck with little to no ability to save up, is sure contributing to this mode of thinking.)
When I did a summer holiday job during my A-levels, people talked about hourly rates and got paid weekly; when I was at Aberystwyth at the end of my degree, I remember some local employment scheme that listed pay per week; I think the job contracts after I graduated and before I moved country were usually listing annual pay, but I can't remember. Now I'm in Berlin, discussion is mixed between monthly and annually.
It’s not really watts as there is no real power output. It’s an accident that the units are homogeneous but the output is in Wh/y, where Wh is a convenient way of describing the capacity of a battery (under standardized conditions) and not real energy outputted.
That’s like saying that battery capacity isn’t really kWh because there’s no real energy storage when they are empty. The unit for energy capacity output is still Watt (or horse power seconds per year or any other unit).
Besides that, those battery cells are charged as part of the production process (though not completely), so I could argue that actual energy is leaving the factory.
Watt hour is a unit of energy. Energy is the capacity to do work. When the batter leaves the factory, it is empty. It has no energy, but it can hold energy if you give it some.
It's like if you produced gallon-sized plastic water jugs. Let's say you made 1000 a day. Would it be accurate to say you produced 1000 gallons of water a day? No, you produced 1000 empty jugs.
Batteries are charged when they leave the factory. Besides that 1000 gal/d of storage capacity in your example is a valid unit for specifying factory output, is it not?
Yes, "1000 gal/d of storage capacity" is valid. "1000 gal/d" is not. Even if you used 1000 gal/d colloquially, you would have been talking about the capacity of the bottles.
The misconception you're having here is that "GWh of storage" is the volume of the bottle. You're interpreting it as "GWh", which in the bottle example would be like saying "They produce 1000 gallons of water / d".
Yes but this assumes infinite availability of the resources required for battery production. Given they are in Africa and Asia, this is gonna be way more difficult in the rising new world order with the shrinking influence of the US and EU as the Pax Americana is dying a slow death.
BRICS nations and friends will make the near future very uncomfortable for Westerners used to affluence.
Out of the world's five largest lithium producing countries, the largest one by far is Australia, only China is in Asia, and half the world's reserves are in South America anyway.
The US will simply do whatever it always did and, should the need arise, simply putsch away whoever governs these reserves.
30TWh/year in 2031 is not infinite, and is in fact quite finite...
Also, essential minerals are alllllll over, only some (cobalt nickel) are concentrated in a few areas and those are actively being minimized and eliminated from future chemistries.
This is one of the reasons I'm not sure why car companies are getting directly in to batteries. Plus they are locking themselves into a technology which may well be superseded.
It seems to me equivalent to pc manufacturers making their own chips.
I appear to have lost my bookmark, it was about 30 minutes in to an episode of the podcast The Energy Gang, or their sister podcast, during an interview with a CEO that has raised nearly a billion dollars over the years for battery related businesses.
This is vague enough that perhaps you shouldn't take my word, but I unfortunately don't have the 15 minutes this weekend to track it down... if I find it again I will try to email you.
I’m pretty sure the answer is - they took physics in high school, they’ve been (on average) at least ten years out of high school, and it never came up, even once.
Do people outside of stem fields have this issue with us? It is really strange to think that most people don't remember any calculus or statistics, or chemistry or physics. While my social intelligence is certainly lacking, I do at least feel like I understand what my friends in non-stem careers are talking about, and the opposite is definitely not true.
Outside of the relatively narrow niche of web related tech, is any other STEM perishable? Physics, chemistry and calculus haven't changed that much right?
Sorry I’m not sure I understand. Watt hour is a unit of energy. Energy can be stored. They’re making batteries that store energy. A Watt is a unit of power. They’re not making power. So after a year of making batteries, they will have produced exactly 0 Watts. I guess in that sense you can measure their (power) output in Watts: they produce 0 Watts.
I think the confusion is that the unit of their product is not GWh. It’s (GWh of capacity) which is not the simple product of Watt and hour)
How much battery capacity are they producing per day? Impossible to tell from the article. I’m relatively sure that the period of time the specified capacity is produced in is one year.
You can divide the hours in GWh by the year time span and the time units cross out. The unit is Watt, but the physical quantity it’s describing is arguably not power but energy capacity production rate or something similar.
There’s no 1:1 mapping between units and physical quantities, just think about specific impulse in rocket engines being quantified in seconds.
The unit is GWh, the physical quantity it describes is “energy storage capacity”. Those two are not the same.
Take this example:
Unit: second, physical quantity: could be things like “time”, “specific impulse”, “distance” (light-second), etc. Many physical quantities can be measured in seconds.
Is it really true that you can measure distance in seconds? I think light-seconds are different units from seconds hence why they measure distances, similar to how Watt-hours and Watts are not the same unit. If a second was a measure of distance then speed would be unit-less (second / second) as opposed to the speed of light which is light-second / second ≈ 3e8 m/s.
You are right, light seconds don't fit in well. My point still stands, you can't really know what physical quantity is measured just from looking at the unit alone, that's now what units are made for.
No you cannot. Watt hour is a unit for energy derived by applying power over time. That’s why when you divide by a period of time you’re left with power. The unit “GWh of storage” is a complex unit that’s not easily broken up. When you divide by time you get a new unit, “GWh of storage per unit time”
You are conflating two different concepts here. One is "unit" which is a measure of a physical quantity (ie "GWh"). The second is the physical quantity itself ("battery storage capacity"). The relationship between the two is that a unit can be used to quantitatively describe a physical quantity ("5 GWh of battery storage capacity"). Physical quantities like "battery storage capacity" can usually be quantified in different units which can be converted to each other ("5000kWh = 5GWh = 1.8 * 10^13 J"). The unit itself ("GWh") doesn't describe precisely what physical quantity is being measured. It could be mechanical energy stored in a flywheel, the total heat output of a chemical reaction, battery storage capacity, etc.
You’re fundamentally misunderstanding the units. I don’t know what else to say. “Watt hour of storage” is not the same as a Watt hour. You can’t divide by time to get power. That should be obvious.
That’s what you’re not understanding. “GWh of storage” is a unit. It’s not an SI unit, but it is a unit, i.e. a thing you can use to measure something. The production of this factory is being measured in this storage unit. Watt is also a unit, a unit to measure power. There is no way to convert a unit of power to this unit of storage.
Do you have a reference for the definition of this energy storage unit? I have never heard of it before and my attempts at searching the web seem to contradict you.
Wikipedia writes: “Storage capacity is the amount of energy extracted from an energy storage device or system; usually measured in joules or kilowatt-hours and their multiples”
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu... writes: “Storage systems for electricity include battery, flywheel, compressed air, and pumped hydro storage. Any systems are limited in the total amount of energy they can store. Their energy capacity is expressed in megawatt-hours (MWh), and the power, or maximum output at a given time, is expressed in megawatts of electric power (MW or MWe).”
Both of which to my layman reading opposes your claim.
You decided all on your own that GWh of storage cannot be divided by a time unit to create another 'new' unit, GW of storage. Repeat: _You_ decided that. I can explain it simply: One GW of storage is equivalent to producing one gigajoule of storage per second.
It seems like the main values of Tesla's cylindrical cells are that cylinders pack fairly tight, but also they make for pretty cool looking assembly lines because you can roll them around. Neither of these are particularly useful qualities in a production vehicle.
I'm curious if a prismatic cell solution - especially if they take 'prismatic' literally instead of meaning "rectangular", can be better optimized for heat dissipation. It's easier to tune surface area to internal area when you can make more sophisticated shapes, like truncated cuboids to provide rectangular cooling channels, or concave surfaces to make cylindrical ones.
batteries are round because the process to make them was a flow process, and its natural to roll things up from ribbons and sheets. Folding introduces more complexities: how do you make the fold the right length? what does it do to the barrier between things?
folding and layers don't mix as well as rolling and layers. swiss rolls, sushi rolls, battery cells are basically the same thing with chemistry differences.
capacitors come in cans for much the same reason. you take sheets of "stuff" and cover them with semi liquid other "stuff" and you roll them up and then cut the long rolls into short segments, put them in cans, attach electrodes and you have a capacitor. Sorry battery. Sorry Swiss roll. Sorry, sashimi. No: we got that order wrong.
Prismatic cells are still rolled as far as I’m aware, and from the few videos I’ve seen. They just don’t start with round core, they start with a different shape, such as a flat one for rectangular cells like in cell phones or Apple laptops.
Apple hit a trifecta when they started making their own batteries. The MacBook where they introduced them got twice the battery life. The new OSX version had better battery management. The prismatic, unpackaged cells occupied 30% more volume within the case, because they dropped the packaging, the round cells, and used a tiny motherboard. And finally the chemistry of the new cells increased the watt hours per cubic centimeter by 30%.
But the difference between a laptop and a car is that the laptop batteries were maybe 3/8” thick. Plenty of top and bottom surface area to dissipate heat. Or so they thought (lots of swelling batteries in those models).
If you wrapped the battery around a thin trapezoid, or a very thin parallelogram, I think you get that truncated cuboid shape once you have laid up a half dozen layers or so, because of the way the radius of the corners builds up with each wrap.
Pleating is interesting mechanically because its very strong in the right 'direction' considering the pleats. Its what makes corrugated cardboard work.
I suspect pleating would work well with "flow" production methods which start with sheets, and do some kind of printing/overlay process in a shallow bath, and then you have 100m of thing, which you pleat before canning/containerising and its both robust and a BIT flexible in some plain in the 3D space, so you can shape it around things.
Cylindrical cells also leave space for cooling (and heating!) channels when you assemble them together. Some companies tried to pack them more efficiently and then realized you NEED the cooling channels to avoid thermal runaways, fires, premature degradation, limp mode and extremely slow charging....
40 GWh or half a million vehicles per year (80 kWh each). A lot but also not a lot if you consider hundreds of millions of vehicles need to be replaced.
If we used plug in hybrids with 10 kWh batteries, this would be enough for four million vehicles.
Disclosure: I work for GM, this is solely my own opinion and experience.
There is a strong assumption that battery costs will come down, and raw material extraction will ramp up.
It is important to remember that we are currently extracting megatons of fossil fuels and just burning them to ash and carbon dioxide yearly.
There is also a strong assumption that batteries will be very recyclable in the future (recycling batteries will make economic sense)
Consider that a plug in hybrid needs two full propulsion systems. Both of those systems need to be engineered, tested, integrated, built, warrantee-ed, and serviced.
If battery prices do come down, the cost of the extra battery pack will soon be lower than the added cost of the ICE propulsion system.
It is my understanding that these factors led GM's leadership team to stop producing the Volt (plug in hybrid) system and transition to all EV.
If, however, battery prices stay high or go up for an extended period of time, this bet will look worse.
This is a really helpful industry perspective, thanks csours. When GM and others are thinking about this, is it focused on beliefs in specific markets or globally? I know that many commodities trade globally but there is a ton of noise in DC about critical mineral supply chains and America's reliance on China but at the same time minimal movement on extraction and even less on processing domestically because of the environmental factors/NIMBYism. But if there were another trade war with China, would that change the equation for GM or are the rest of the markets a large enough weight that doesn't matter? Do you think GM and others believe there will be U.S. mines brought online or that all the growth in extraction will come from abroad? Given the pushback in other places (e.g. Serbia's Rio Tinto mine, Mexico nationalizing their sector, etc.) I'm pretty skeptical about being able to depend solely on foreign growth.
I believe government incentives and regulations will have a huge effect on the speed of adoption in a country, and China and Europe have both of those. I don't think mineral extraction will have much effect on locality. Shipping is pretty cheap - we already move oil to refineries and gasoline to filling stations.
GM does have a
>> “strategic investment and commercial collaboration” with Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR) to procure lithium from Southern California’s Salton Sea
A while back I looked at raw materials for batteries. You can see the big push to get away from batteries that use cobalt. Because that is the one input that is actually supply limited. Everything else but lithium is tapping into an already huge production capacity.
>It is my understanding that these factors led GM's leadership team to stop producing the Volt (plug in hybrid) system and transition to all EV.
>If, however, battery prices stay high or go up for an extended period of time, this bet will look worse.
It's interesting to me that GM was really a pioneer in PHEVs with the Volt. They decided to transition their strategy at the same time as it seems like most other manufacturers debuted their first PHEVs. I have several friends that had Volts who went to other manufacturers because their use case still required a PHEV.
Was this purely to push buyers into the Bolt? This seems like an odd strategy since the Bolt, using LGs battery technology, is a transition technology itself for GM because it doesn't utilize the Ultium architecture.
How expensive would it have been to allow the Volt to solider on for a few more years with minor updates until an Ultium vehicle in a similar package with an extended range were available?
The thing I like the most about the bolt is that it isn’t a spacecar / tron-mobile.
It’s just a Chevy car … but electric.
As opposed to, for instance, Mercedes or Volvo - e-initiative i-mobiles that are chaotic dumping grounds for futuristic design concepts that nobody asked for.
We don’t want your "electric car" … we just want your car, electric.
> It is important to remember that we are currently extracting megatons of fossil
Extracting oil doesn't leave the total devastation behind it as extracting cobalt does [1]. A several orders of magnitude increase in that sort of abomination that I linked to doesn't have anything to do with "saving the planet", it's all politics and money. There's also the whole "child labor" thing [2] but let's assume that countries like Congo will sort it out sometimes in the next 10-20 years, they most probably won't, but there's always hope.
Desulphurisation is required to turn the extracted oil into something that can be used in a car. That process requires cobalt. So yeah the dirty cobalt business is directly supported by oil-based cars as well. However, I think catalyst use vs. battery use of cobalt is roughly 1:5 so your point remains valid (it's used more in batteries than in desulphurisation). Unfortunately I cannot find free statistics to support this 1:5 ratio which is from memory, maybe someone else can supply a link.
1:5 in what? I mean if it takes five times the cobalt to manufacture a kilogram of battery compared to a kilogram of gasoline, that sounds like a point in favour of EVs. You can only use that gasoline once after all, whereas the lithium could serve the full vehicle lifetime.
I'm not going to defend the damage mining like this does, but it seems unfair to say oil is any better [0]. In my opinion, oil causes much more damage and is harder to contain.
I agree about harder to contain, that's why that oil pipeline that was supposed to pass through the middle of an industrialised country was cancelled [1], that was a political move by definition, while cobalt mines and the like, because they mostly "happen" in the middle of Africa, are just seen as "doesn't really affect me -> it isn't really that important".
Today, one of the major uses of Cobalt is removing sulfur from gasoline. Somehow that never comes up in the "child labor!!" arguments against electric cars.
Of course the electric car is simpler, and batteries are getting cheaper. But the electric car with enough range for my use case is significantly more expensive in total still.
We have tax advantages for electric cars, very expensive fuels, very cheap electricity. Still the deal doesn't close yet.
The infrastructure is hopefully developing also, so they would get working chargers and working payment systems by the time the batteries have become cheap enough too. And charging systems that don't cost thousands per post for apartment building parking lots.
In a sense, the system is riddled with so many inefficiencies at every layer. The only way to do it properly is to have a vertically integrated company like Tesla. They have their own chargers and do a lot of their own components instead of using subcontractors. They don't use low quality charging services or apps or payment cards. The experience can be controlled only that way.
As opposed to oil, battery prices are highly influenced by China’s grip on the battery value chain at least until 2030.
Just as China will influence steel and aluminum prices through central planning, battery prices are unlikely to remain higher than current peak as long as the government continues its current stance on stable prices.
Regardless of whether the mines are outside of China, the refinement/separation step of mined raw materials is done mostly in China (>80% global capacity). In addition to the 3-5 year lead time of building the capacity through new refineries, there’s a significant process optimization learning curve (non-transferable learnings) to move down the cost curve for new refinery entrants.
> If battery prices do come down, the cost of the extra battery pack will soon be lower than the added cost of the ICE propulsion system.
That definitively matter for some cars.
However, the relationship between humans and cars is not like it is between humans and most other products. The same car by features can easily be sold for twice the price, or even higher with minor added conveniences, improved quality, or brand. Add $5000 for a different color.
As long as an ICE is a feature people want to their car to have it won't matter that a battery is cheaper.
> As long as an ICE is a feature people want to their car to have it won't matter that a battery is cheaper.
The EU has voted a complete ban of the sale of new ICE and hybrid cars by 2035. It doesn't matter if ICE is a feature people want or not: it's not going to be an option.
The point was that price is not a relevant criterion. There may be others reasons.
The EU isn't the whole world. Also, the EU bans new dinosaur-burning cars from 2035. Cars with ICEs running on something else (synthetic) will most likely remain legal.
For ICEs to fully vanish from the market it would take a complete ban or some disruptive technology that works better for all use cases, to make them completely non-desirable for everyone.
"There is a strong assumption that battery costs will come down"
On what bases? Typically bigger demand leads to price increase, do we have new sources of Lithium/Cobalt/Copper that would increase production significantly?
Or build smaller cars. Not everybody needs an 80kwh SUV. That's just the current market, which seems to favor stupidly big, heavy, and inefficient cars. That's not going to stay that way and VW is already planning to build smaller and cheaper cars. There are some cool vehicles hitting the market now that emphasize efficiency and range over just being big. E.g. Lightyear has very good aerodynamics and weight and a few other manufacturers are focusing on that as well.
A light city car like a Nissan Leaf does pretty well with just 40kwh. The original one shipped with just 20kwh and that was a relatively heavy vehicle. Imagine the same vehicle with twice the energy density. It would have a lot more range. A few kwh go a long way on light vehicles. Electrical motor cycles have somewhere in the range of only 4-8kwh. A lot of electrical bicycles have less than 1 kwh. 10kwh is plenty for a light vehicle.
Anyway, hybrids have all the downsides of owning an ICE car (lots of moving parts, pollution, expensive fuel, maintenance cost, etc.) with only some of the upsides of owning an EV (torque, fuel economy, etc.). Basically, in terms of cost and complexity, they don't make a lot of sense. The cheaper batteries get, the less sense they make. Right now EVs are just really expensive which means not everybody can afford one. However, cheaper, smaller EVs are perfectly feasible and a lot cheaper to make. Once the high end market saturates, smaller, lighter and cheaper EVs are the next obvious growth market. From next to nothing to many millions in volume is going to happen relatively quickly. In such a market, hybrids don't really stand a chance.
Those hundreds of millions of vehicles will be replaced over the course of 2-3 decades. Annual production volume of cars will be mostly EVs by mid next decade; in about 15 years. From then on, another 15 years or so later, most ICE vehicles will have been decommissioned. The value proposition at 2022 cost levels is already pretty great for EVs (with incentives and if you can afford them). Another 3 decades of technical improvements, economies of scale, etc. is going to only improve the economics.
> Or build smaller cars. Not everybody needs an 80kwh SUV. That's just the current market, which seems to favor stupidly big, heavy, and inefficient cars.
From my perspective, this is a regulatory issue.
Auto-manufacturers have been pushing products and platforms that streamline, simplify, and reduce cost. That means if their premier work truck, consumer truck, and SUV all share the same underlying platform it's a win. This doesn't incentivize the development of multiple platforms that are right fit but rather marketing manipulation to make the consumer think something is the right fit.
Making lighter vehicles is a big strategy to make electric affordable quick indeed. Maybe some companies will manage to find good solution and implement them quicker than car makers? Renault managed this with the Twizy.
I investigated myself plugin hybrid vs full electric, and full electric won for the simple fact that a plugin needs to be charged every day I will drive somewhere. For the electric, I can recharge it once a week or twice a month and it will cover my needs. I don't have an in-house charger so this is a massive difference.
For VW to build 10 million electric vehicles to keep numbers up [1], at 60kWh per vehicle which approximately the midsized ID.3 [2], they need to build roughly 12x this capacity, so ~$240B investment which is about what the whole company is worth today [3].
This is also a first investment. They can wait a year and invest double in a larger plant - when building something for mass manufacture you start with a smaller plant to learn how to do it, and then a larger one applying all the expensive lessons learned the hard way from the first. Sometimes this cycle is repeating dozens of times.
In emerging markets, hybrids are a much smarter choice. Here in Brazil there are few fast chargers (say 40kW+), and a great bunch of them are broken anyway. My next car will be a plug-in hybrid. Maybe an electric in 10 years.
Indeed the infrastructure's just not there yet in most places, and not just Brazil, it sucks basically everywhere.
PHEVs can be charged at home and should have enough battery range for those short daily errands across town, while having the range of a normal ICE car for long trips where the lack of fast chargers is most critical. Plus they'll break down more due to higher complexity and the repair shops will love and lobby for them so win-win-win.
EVs are indubitably miles ahead in terms of being simple to maintain mechanically since it's a sealed fixed gear system (the software is another matter, but let's disregard that for now), but I don't believe those numbers for the PHEV for a second.
You're maintaining both an EV and an ICE at the same time in one car with both needing to interface with each other in complex ways. There's bound to be in the range of 4x as much that can go wrong compared to just one or the other. You'll have the mechanical issues of the ICE coupled with the software problems of an EV.
It's an absolutely stupid idea to even consider doing these sort of overcomplicated hybrids, but unfortunately it's also the only way to get around the abysmal battery capacity we currently have.
>> but I don't believe those numbers for the PHEV for a second.
Having driven a PHEV for over 2 years now, I can easily believe them - the main ICE runs so rarely, it's practically brand new. I cover like 90% of my journeys in EV mode alone. I've just done my second service and the brake pads are like 5% worn - after 20kk miles, in a 2.2 tonne SUV. All because of regenerative breaking - it's absolutely remarkable. So yes, I imagine repairs of this car will be cheaper long term, not more expensive - the ICE drive train is going to have fewer problem if you just don't use it half as much.
> You're maintaining both an EV and an ICE at the same time in one car with both needing to interface with each other in complex ways.
The interface does not need to be complex. Hooking them directly together is simple enough. Some designs replace parts of the gearbox with the motors, making the combination simpler than the sum of its parts. And if you have a fully electric drivetrain then you can vastly simplify the ICE.
(Also I don't know how you could possibly reach 4x even if it was as complex as you're saying!)
You don’t really need fast chargers if your overnight spot has any charging. Ours has been charged almost exclusively on a standard US 120V 15A household outlet - 5 miles/hr of range, but it’s parked for >14 hours a day, so it regains 70+ miles overnight.
I don't really need the car on a daily basis, mostly for road trips, and, like the US, Brazil has continental proportions (we think in thousands of kms). The BMW iX is very impressive, there are videos of it doing Sao Paulo > Rio, and half of the way back, without a charge, which is amazing, but that's a best-case path with a considerable number of chargers. Still very pricey though.
Oh well yeah, for road trips it’s different. But for day to day, 70 miles of charging (on a 300 mile range battery) is enough to keep it so it’s usually topped up, and after a longer day trip where it’s not enough, it’ll get back to full over a few days.
It sounds like a normal hybrid is a better idea if the charging infrastructure is bad. A normal hybrid would be cheaper and never needs to be plugged in.
If you can't charge at home, PHEV is completely nonsense, or say waste of battery compared to HEV. PHEV should be for who can charge at home, drives daily, and want long trips with quick gas charge.
Even if you can't charge at home, PHEV is still worth it over HEV because it will increase resale value, and because you may be able to charge somewhere in the future (eg work, or different home). The cost of the plug is negligible, so making an HEV that can't plug in is just a waste.
PHEV for future proof is good point. Simple plug cost could be minor, but HEVs have small battery (and don't use fully for long life) so just adding plug is almost useless. Who wants only 5km EV range?
that's a lot of my point. The Prius prime (for example) has a 8.8kwh battery, which at $130 per kwh works out to $1150 of battery. That's not negligible, but the benefit is pretty massive. That's a big enough battery to get you 20-25 miles of pure electric range which means that if you have a short commute, you will dramatically cut your gas usage. Full BEV is great obviously, but IMO, you probably want 1 car to be gas optional still, and a PHEV gives you an easy path to be driving almost 100% electric with 0 compromises compared to a gas car.
The streets of Paris have lots of chargers along the sidewalks, seems like cities elsewhere should be able to pull that off as well. Doesn’t even need to be high powered if they’re intended to be parked at overnight.
There'd have to be charger every 5-6 meters or so along most sidewalks where I live to make electric viable. Certainly not impossible, but sounds like an absolutely massive investment.
The vast majority of parking spaces are free and don't have any meters at all.
Sure downtown there is parking meters, but not in the suburbs where free parking is the norm and most parking spaces go weeks between seeing anyone park in them.
No meters in neighborhoods around here, just painted curbs. I only see meters on very dense downtown blocks, and many seem to be solar powered (which seems feasible for an LCD and a card slot).
In my city, there's maybe a parking meter for every 20 spots. Plus, most spots are in non-metered areas. PLUS, the meter does not require a very high voltage power line...
The problem is that hybrids are good only for range anxiety. You assume you're getting an EV and a great range — best of both worlds. The reality is that you get worst of both worlds: a crappy low-end EV experience with worst-case charging, and a poor ICE car with even less cabin/cargo space than a pure ICE (and much less than a pure BEV).
In hybrids, the battery is very tiny, so lasts for a day or two instead of a week or more. This means having a home charger is an absolute necessity. Small batteries don't support rapid charging, so you won't be able to use many public chargers, even if you were patient enough to wait hours instead of minutes.
Horesepower of hybrid cars is advertised as a sum of EV+ICE engines together, but that's a rare scenario. You'll be mostly using underpowered EV-only half when you can, and then the underpowered ICE-only half when you run out of juice.
When you're on electricity, you're lugging an ICE engine, and when you're road tripping, you have worse fuel economy due to lugging a useless battery and an EV motor (regen doesn't do much even when it works, and highway cruising is the worst-case scenario for it).
In many hybrids transmission/clutch adds a lag, so you don't get the sweet instant torque BEVs are known for.
You have worst-case maintenance costs. On top of all the moving parts of an ICE engine and a complex gearbox, your battery will wear out sooner. A small battery will tend to be cycled 100% to 0%, instead of kept in the 80%-50% range that is much gentler for lithium batteries.
As a recent PHEV purchaser, I have to disagree on most counts. All typical driving is fully electric, meaning routine commuting, shopping, etc. is all covered by the battery. The home charger is required, but so so simple because it fully charges off a normal (15A) circuit overnight. So it's literally just plugged in to a normal wall outlet. No big deal. Sure you're lugging around the ICE, but it has a much smaller and lighter battery compared to an all electric. Id be curious to see what the real weights involved are, but it's not like you're adding an ICE to a full electric battery. The thing still gets 46mpg even when the battery is depleted, which is better than any other ICE car I've ever had. And there is no transmission in the electric power train as far as I can tell, if there is it's seamless. As for maintenance costs, we'll see. I suspect your analysis will be at least partially correct, having the two independent drive trains and the system to combine them seems like a minefield of long term maintenance. But that was the risk I was willing to take given all of the other benefits.
Like patentatt, I disagree with most of this. Which PHEVs are you looking at?
Some can blend power from electric and gas motors and give you the combined power output for modest durations almost any time--and then will use excess ICE capacity or regenerative breaking to recharge the battery.
Yes, of course you plug in any time you're home. Not an issue if you have off-street parking, any outlet works.
Transmission/clutch lag--which car have you driven? Does not exist at all in mine (GM Volt), have not heard anyone mention it in reviews of RAV4 Prime or other recent PHEVs.
It is in fact the best-case scenario for some driving profiles.
I have many modest-distance trips around town, and ~30 long drives a year, at least 10 of which would require a midway additional hour of charging in a BEV, with half the drive through an area that has no fast chargers and will not get any in the next 3 years.
The funny thing is that everything you said makes sense on paper, but in reality none of it matters.
I have an XC60 T8 PHEV, it's the best car I have ever owned, hands down.
>>a crappy low-end EV experience with worst-case charging, and a poor ICE car with even less cabin/cargo space than a pure ICE (and much less than a pure BEV).
Don't see it at all. It charges in 3 hours - what's the problem? That I can't rapid charge it on the motorway? Ok, fair.
The space inside it is the same as in a petrol XC60. There is no compromise.
>>You'll be mostly using underpowered EV-only half when you can, and then the underpowered ICE-only half when you run out of juice.
The EV motor isn't super powerful, but it's absolutely sufficient for driving around. And the ICE is 320bhp in this model, it's far far far far from "underpowered". It's a rocketship, and I owned an actual Mercedes-AMG before. In the mode where both ICE and EV motors work together this car will outaccelerate anything due to the instant torque.
>>you have worse fuel economy due to lugging a useless battery and an EV motor (regen doesn't do much even when it works, and highway cruising is the worst-case scenario for it).
Maybe, but this car averages 50mpg(imperial) on long journeys anyway, so I really don't see a downside here. Regular Petrol XC60 struggles to keep 40. Diesel XC60 would beat it, but who wants a diesel. And my long term(2 years+) average overal is 120mpg, so really......whatever?
>>In many hybrids transmission/clutch adds a lag, so you don't get the sweet instant torque BEVs are known for.
Many, but not all - in the XC60 the EV motor is mounted directly on the rear axle so it doesn't go through the transmission at all. It accelerates instantly like any EV.
>>You have worst-case maintenance costs. On top of all the moving parts of an ICE engine and a complex gearbox
I'm seeing the opposite after couple years of ownership - the ICE almost never runs, so it doesn't suffer any wear. At every oil change the oil is completely clear - the motor is practically brand new. After 20kk miles the brake pads are 5% worn, because you do most breaking by regenerative breaking. So far this car is saving me a fortune in running costs and maintenance, and I don't see why this shouldn't continue. If anything, this car and its drivetrain will far outlast any regular ICE car out there.
>>your battery will wear out sooner.
If this was an actual concern, the manufacturer wouldn't give it 8 years warranty. It's longer warranty than on my actual real proper BEV that I also have.
I’m an automotive EE, I’ve had almost all types of vehicles to drive. I really like the Wrangler plug in hybrid. My week to week saw almost zero gas being used, it was like having a full electric and I could still drive wherever I wanted. With 4Low and diff lockers. Loved it!
I drive ~12mi a day, works great for me, but I know it’s not for people with commutes.
Plug-in hybrids are in a weird spot in the market. People who have access to home charging can buy long-range EVs which are much nicer to drive. People without access to home charging can buy non-plug-in hybrids or gas-powered cars. Most plug-in hybrids cost a bit more than the non-plug-in versions of the same car and their battery-only driving range is quite short.
No matter where you are in the car market, plug-in hybrids are a weird compromise, delivering all the slowness of a hybrid and the requirement to have access to charging like an EV, for more money than a normal hybrid car.
The other disadvantage hybrids have is that you have all the complexity of a both an electric and a gas car. One nice thing about full electric is that you do away with much of the regular maintenance of an ICE car.
There is that, but in a plug-in hybrid, the gas engine does not get used a lot. When it does, it is usually operating in a serial hybrid mode and runs within an optimal range without much stress. Actual wear and tear and maintenance are much less than in a conventional ICEV. You see this with Priuses and Volts. The gas engines live an unstressed life and last much longer. The Volt keeps track of usage and alerts you when it is time for an oil change. They can easily go 18 months between oil changes.
That's fair, but still a big difference psychologically between 18m and never. Plus various other fluids. Even brake pads and rotors—on pure EVs they basically last forever thanks to regenerative braking. Perhaps modern hybrids do have that benefit as well now though.
>>on pure EVs they basically last forever thanks to regenerative braking. Perhaps modern hybrids do have that benefit as well now though.
They do. I have owned an XC60 PHEV for over 2 years now, after 20kk miles the brake pads were 5% worn. And it's a 2.2 tonne, 400bhp SUV. Without regenerative braking the pads would be almost gone now.
I mean, you take your car in to the shop once a year for its inspection, they take care of it all for you. The only difference with the BEV is they don't charge you $X0 for the oil change.
The recommended frequency for Tesla appears to be every two years, check brake fluids and replace cabin air filter. Lots of Tesla owners don’t bother outside of tire changes.
I'm sure there's a long list of "inspect" to go with that? At some point timing belt? Other belts? Spark plugs? One day the alternator will die, then the water pump, head gasket, exhaust pipe will rust, the battery, starter motor, brake pads, break disks? Oxygen sensor... man the list of stuff in ICE cars that's not in EVs that can and definitely will fail just goes on and on and on. Sure, most of it past the 10 year mark, but it's a lot of stuff.
Is this North America spec btw? (there's difference in maintenance intervals usually).
I've driven ICE for many many many years and I never want to go back. I don't want to smell gasoline in the gas station... The model 3's maintenance is basically cabin air filter and brake fluid which honestly you can just not touch for 5 years with no problem if you live somewhere with clean air ;) it's essentially zero maintenance.
That's exactly my feeling. I still like the ICE for a fun weekend car (not that the Model 3 isn't fun, but something lightweight with some character is nice for variety), but for anything I'm putting a lot of miles on, not having to worry about all that is fantastic.
The biggest concern I've heard for hybrids is lifetime maintenance cost. You have both the legacy ICE and transmission, as well as electrical components to maintain. That's a major hypothetical disadvantage to all electric.
Toyota Priuses have been sold for over 20 years (closer to 25 actually!) and they are very reliable. There are Prius taxis with half a million miles on the original battery.
I love my EV, but I'll be switching to a hybrid when the lease is up. EVs are great but charging is currently a pain. I have no doubt I'll switch back to an EV in a few years, but right now, they're not worth it to me.
We need to cut down on cars a lot, the emissions equation doesn't make sense otherwise. Because (a) replacing cars is hugely CO2 intensive and (b) there doesn't seem to be any reasonable timescale path to leaving the currently known oil/gas deposits in the ground and not pumping & burning them up. Until there is, EVs are just additional emissions.
> you consider hundreds of millions of vehicles need to be replaced.
They probably won't be all replaced. A minority of people (I'd put it at around 15-20% max) will afford to own an EV (price + place to charge it), while the great majority of us will be left with old combustion-engine cars, Cuba style (or until the law will prohibit them entirely, most probably).
That's not what that link says. It says that hybrids deliver a larger CO2 reduction per unit of battery, and because batteries are scarce, we would do better CO2 reduction by focusing limited battery capacity in hybrid vehicles, as this would lead to the greatest number of miles traveled on electric charge, along with some savings from the weight of batteries.
It definitely does not say that BEVs have higher emissions over the course of a car's life. It pretty clearly shows that BEVs have the largest decrease in CO2 emissions, as you would expect.
And yet, there are plenty of BEVs on the market that will never have lower emissions than a Prius Prime. Some of this junk is leaving the factory with embodied carbon higher than the lifetime emissions of a plug-in hybrid. Looking at you, Polestar.
I had a great amount of fun today hammering my tiny petrol engine.
It's 1.5L with no turbo that's 10 years old (toyota yaris hatchback). I can floor it, it revs noticably, but it's so underpowered that I have zero chance of losing control because while it sounds like it's working hard, there's barely anything behind it.
I get that EVs are the future. They make more sense. But a small childish part of me will miss the "experience" of hammering under-powered petrol engines.
I hear you - loud cars are annoying, and I probably over-emphasised how loud it was. It's stock exhaust on a subcompact family car, but the cabin isn't the quietest and it has to rev very highly to do anything.
It's my lame safe way of having a little bit of fun. Certainly quieter than all the trucks on the road, and slower than a lot of the SUVs.
I recently got an electric motorcycle, and it’s a similarly visceral experience. I can hear the tires digging into the dirt and have a much better feel for traction and speed because of it. The effortless (and extreme) torque, with just a small whir, is a riot as well.
People often complain about electric (particularly motorcycles) not being “loud enough”. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t noise, or that there’s not anything to be in tune with.
I’m not so excited about the future where an 18 year old feels like flooring their used EV with shitty brakes, and 0-100km/h acceleration that is twice as fast as an 80s Lamborghini.
This isn’t a problem yet because these cars are still a few years out from being affordable by those drivers and they are still in good shape.
Remember what happened to those kids in the 90s that drove souped up M3s or Nissan Skylines?
Some EV builder will eventually provide sound/haptic emulation so that you can have the tactile experience of anything from a Keicar to a Bentley V12 by modifying some simple settings. One of the most promising things about EVs is that they really can be software defined. Also one of the most scary. Hope they use Rust.
Some of the Yaris models are kind of hideous but I think they’re going to go down in history along with cars like the Volkswagen bug for sheer practicality. Not the kind of vehicle to get a reviewers attention but the price performance ratio was pretty damn good for us civilians. I really enjoyed using one as a loaner when I left my car at the Toyota dealership.
> But a small childish part of me will miss the "experience" of hammering under-powered petrol engines.
Well they are small, light, and pack about 105hp into a modern efficient engine developed by one of the great auto engineering staffs in history. Why not have a little fun with it?
Don't worry, you'll probably be able to simulate that with some kind of "retro mode".
Many ICE cars already artificially pump in the sound of an older, nosier engine when you put them into sports mode.
My 4 cylinder diesel GTD sounds like a V8 when I floor it (unless I have the windows open of course. In which case I can actually hear the engine and like all diesels it just sounds like a tractor).
You'd just need to add some kind of engine response curve to the EV throttle[1] to simulate hitting the correct rev band/gear change.
1. Even that word is a retro throwback in an EV, as is "driver" when you really think about its etymology.
I've been a gearhead practically my whole life, so I totally understand. Personally I think ICE cars will soon be thought about much the way we think of steam locomotives. They're pretty cool, some people will always love them, tinker with them (or models), there will be shows, etc. But compared to modern transportation they are loud, slow, stinky polluting machines that no one in their right mind would ever use for daily transportation. ICE had a good run (ignoring the whole climate change thing), but times change! See also: carburetors, manual choke, drum brakes, leaf springs, etc. ;-)
For months I had to drive my Yarris up and down a pretty rough track - no gravel, full of potholes, just hardened earth and stones.
The Yarris with its little go-kart wheels handled it like a champ, even if I'd bottom out almost every single time. Even climbed up it fine provided you kept it above 25km/h all the way :) Took to a mechanic later and he said the suspension and undercarriage were fine.
You mean being the undisputed king of the hill in terms of online battery production manufacturing capacity in a market that right now seems to have an unlimited demand for batteries? They are building new factories as fast as they can with a head-start on everybody else and they seem to be getting really good at it.
VW is planning to be where Tesla is this year in about five years in terms of GWH per year. Tesla is moving really aggressively in terms of new production capacity, partnerships with Panasonic and others, and strategic investments in supply chains as well as expansion into other applications for batteries (e.g. supporting the grid). I'd say, it will be a while before anybody catches up in terms of volume and economics. It's going to require more than what VW is investing right now. And I think they will invest quite aggressively. This isn't their last move; just the latest one.
What’s so special about Tesla today? The promised self driving isn’t here. There are better cars on the market today to show how rich you are. Yes, Tesla cars are more efficient than competition. But heck, who cares about 2 kWh more when buying cars in that price range.
A close friend of mine recently compared all EV offerings available for a family lifestyle, when buying a new car. He concluded that all but one of them was inferior to the Model Y, either in price, range, space, features, service cost. One of the BMWs was in some senses better, but he concluded "but it's 'just a car'; there's nothing magical about it" and got the Model Y anyway.
Notably, the BMW was also significantly more expensive to service.
Model Y was too expensive for me. Took Kia EV6. Trunk is smaller, but I will do just fine with that. BMW iX is super cool, but I can’t justify the price.
This is a soundly middle-class Norwegian family. The one thing that distinguishes them from the rest of the world's middle class is the exemption of the 25% VAT for EVs.
2. We're 8 billion. At least 2-3 billion have enough income to get Renaults and the other brands I mentioned. Norway is the outlier (middle class Norwegians making $100k+), not this very large group of people probably making $10-15k per year (individually).
Median income in Norway is $55k/year before 32% tax and 25% sales tax on everything except the aforementioned EVs, plus various special-purpose taxes on e.g. transportation that brings car TCO for a typical family into the ~$10k/year range.
I'm not even sure what we're discussing anymore. But sure. If it's whether the majority of the world's population is currently in the market for BMW, Tesla or BYD's executive sedan, the answer is obviously no.
My point was rather that there is a very sizable developed-world middle class that is, and that this family is pretty representative among those. Think North America, UK, Germany, France, Scandinavia, Australia rather than India, Africa and China.
Batteries are neat, sure, but too bad they're just not necessary. It would be cool if wireless power was a thing, would be a thing, where we never worried about it, just took power for granted, and electric things just worked as if by magic but invisibly supported by really cool technology, and no one ever mentioned an EV's range again. Boo, Nikola, for getting my hopes up. I mean, it's 2022! Come on with the future already. Nope, global pandemic and war instead. Welcome to the future. Super. I want to go back to the 60's.
Big issue in Australia is we like to dig things up and essentially give them away internationally.
Fossil fuel companies have a very big say in government decisions. There is a recent change of government, so they'll have slightly less of a say - but still a large amount.
What we really need to do, if we were forward-thinking enough, is value-add our resources. Instead of sending away lithium and buying back batteries, we should develop the capability locally.
Do Australia or Chile have material processing capacity? There is a world of difference between lithium and the sorts of refined powders battery makers use to produce the finished product. Besides Redwood Materials in the U.S., I think that refining capacity is almost entirely in China.
Any ”Gigafactory” built these days likely has a plan for producing raw materials through recycling old batteries. There have been cells produced already with nickel/cobalt/manganese from old cells. Lithium will also be recycled into batteries. See e.g the “Revolt ett” plant in Sweden.
EV boom will propel the battery manufacturer to be the next manufacturing Behemoth. It's so much a core of any EV that the industry capital has to be consolidated to be able to produce sufficiently good product and iterate rapidly to match the market demand.
If they stay on track to start ramping up production capacity from about 2-3 years from now, like they have been consistently saying they will, there will be plenty of demand for high energy density, fast charging batteries from VW and other manufacturers. Solid state batteries are going to be popular for expensive high performance vehicles.
People think in either or terms when it comes to battery tech. The reality is that it's a market that is going to keep on doubling in volume every few years for the next few decades. There will be cheap and low density batteries and there will be more expensive high density batteries. The latter won't replace the former and there will be demand for both.
VW will want to be cover the entire market in a decade or so ranging from cheap affordable light cars to expensive, long range luxury vehicles. They'll sell way more of the former than of the latter but make a lot of revenue with a relatively small amount of vehicles. Quantumscape is a great candidate for supplying batteries for those.
I still cannot understand how the world tollerates VW still to this day.
There has been ZERO change in the company's corporate culture since Dieselgate and while there is a lot of green washing happening and the enterprise is visibly moving towards electricity powered products this is just a company going where the money is. They are still the same ruthless business as they where a dozen years ago!
My reading of [1] and news at the time is that "criminal lengths to hide their pollution" is essentially a (nearly) industry wide problem. Also it is unclear to me where you see the proof that vw's corporate culture hasn't changed (although I am willing to believe that, corporate culture is hard to change) or what kind of change you would like to see, a stronger commitment to EVs obviously is not the thing that will convince you.
Yes. I Will buy VW again if they have a product that appeals to me. Just like I trust any Boeing jet that is approved by authorities. Not because I’m a fan of VW or Boeing’s business practices but because I trust the authorities that regulate them both.
Why would it ever dry up? The point of incentives and taxes is to translate preferences into the language of capitalism. If the "green money well dries up" and fossil fuel is more profitable than carbon-neutral fuel, this indicates that we have changed our mind about the importance of green power. At which point, we should switch back.
Funding is not a limited resource, it's a continuous choice.
> PowerCo will use the prismatic unified cell architecture in its batteries which allows for use of different cell chemistries. The cells will be manufactured from 2025 with the factory planned capacity to be 40 GWh which is enough to supply 500,000 electric vehicles. By 2030 PowerCo plans to have all six European factories up and running with a combined capacity of 240 GWh. The unified prismatic cell harnesses synergy effects and can offer manufacturing savings of up to 50% when compared to current batteries.
I didn't see anything in this announcement about where raw materials will be sourced from. It looks like the idea is to support multiple chemistries, but it's far from clear where the materials for all those batteries will come from.
The impression I get is the supplies for batteries are rather more rare than the aluminum and steel, so if current companies are having problems sourcing them it seems like a worthwhile question to ask.
Whether it's in this factory or Tesla or whomever, there is going to be increasing demand in any case.
That impression is a deliberate result of the aforementioned propaganda. Lithium is one of the most plentiful resources on earth. Nickel isn't too hard to come by. Cobalt is the one that's difficult but it is the smallest part of lithium nickel cobalt batteries and progress is being made on reducing and eventually eliminating it (and it is recyclable, as are the lithium and nickel.)
The idea that batteries require rare and hard to source materials is a fabrication. This should be self evident by the way battery production has skyrocketed over the last decade while prices keep dropping at the same time. If material sourcing was hard, that wouldn't have happened.
The price of lithium has gone up 5x recently because the market has realize there is a scarce supply and a rapidly expanding demand. The price of batteries is increasing now instead of declining like they have done in the past.
In theory lithium is abundant in the Earth's crust. In practice, although the market is incentivizing more production now, it takes close to 10 years to bring a new mine online (7 years is doable). There was a glut of these materials in 2020, but by 2025 we will see a major bottleneck. Here is an analysis of the situation: https://youtu.be/5v-DTS-ibow
> That impression is a deliberate result of the aforementioned propaganda.
No its not. Very much pro EV are saying the same things.
> Lithium is one of the most plentiful resources on earth.
Nobody is denying that. That doesn't mean there is not an imbalance between new projects coming online and demand for lithium.
Lithium is not like an Iron mine. Lithium is more like a specialty chemistry and despite it being very common, its very uncommon to have high grade ore. That means lithium projects have to convert low grade ore to very high quality lithium and unlike with other materials, there are no standards. Your lithium output has to be certified individually by each battery/car maker. This adds a huge amount of difficulty in terms of bringing in new product.
If you follow the lithium industry over the last 5 years you will see how incredibly difficult it is to bring on new projects and almost nobody except the established players have managed it. Pretty much all lithium startups have failed to deliver what they said a couple years ago. Even the lithium majors have not expanded as fast as they said.
So if your analysis is limited to 'there is lots of lithium in the crust' then that's a terrible analysis. What you need to compare is the amount of hungry battery factory being built compared to the amount of new lithium mines.
You can build a giga-factory in 3 years, a new lithium project takes 5 years optimistically, and often 10 years.
I recommend this podcast if you want to learn the details of the lithium market, its both market analysis but also interviews with pretty most lithium majors and minors: https://www.globallithium.net/podcast
> Nickel isn't too hard to come by.
Nickel will not run out and battery makers will be willing to pay a premium compared to stainless steel. Even there is an issue where for batteries you need high grade and it will require quite a bit of investment to build facilities to do that conversion. However, that's likely not a limiting factor.
However when we are talking about environmentally friendly, nickel is a huge issue. Almost 100% of nickel growth comes from incredibly dirty mining in Indonesia.
There are significant nickel projects in North America but developing those takes many, many years and have to battle up-hill.
> The idea that batteries require rare and hard to source materials is a fabrication.
No its not, its a real series problem and industry experts pretty much universally agree on that. But of course there are people who overstate this even more to make anti-EV propaganda.
> This should be self evident by the way battery production has skyrocketed over the last decade while prices keep dropping at the same time. If material sourcing was hard, that wouldn't have happened.
As Musk and others have stated. The constant extreme price drop is over, lots of the easy gains from manufacturing are taken. Currently prices are going down because density is still improving slowly. However now that we have gigafactory style production, the cost of the manufacturing is increasingly small and to make further price drops materials prices need to drop and that is not happening.
Battery materials will be a limiting factor for EV roll out over the next couple of years. That is just the reality of the situation.
Also due to the recent spike in the price of nickel, as Russia is (used to be?) one of the major exporters. (There's more nickel than lithium in nickel-based lithium batteries.)
Edit: and cobalt is mined in the Democratic Repuplic of the Congo, which seems to be held in opprobrium by Western countries.
> and cobalt is mined in the Democratic Repuplic of the Congo, which seems to be held in opprobrium by Western countries.
The DRC has been snubbed by the west for decades. China has made key investments there and control a few of their major mines, as well as the trains and ports along the east coast of Africa in Kenya and Nairobi. Of course the west isn't happy with this arrangement, but they had decades to work out a similar arrangement and didn't.
> Its about that the best minerals people all predict that lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite is gone be in shortage.
6% of nickel is used in batteries. 2.7 million tonnes annually are produced, enough for billions of kWh of batteries.
The majority of spheroidal graphite for batteries is synthetically produced because it has better performance. It can be made trivially from virtually any carbon source, including biofuels.
Lithium is more common than lead. Mines are coming. It is set to be wildly oversupplied.
Cobalt use has been dropping by nearly 50% per generation. It's readily mined outside the DRC, which is just the cheapest.
Some people somewhere need to worry about metal production. The same as people need to worry about polypropylene or vinylene carbonate. People did not worry about indium supplies when the iphone took off, or how it would impact tantalum, or whether we'll have enough quartz to make solar panels. It's not important for the PUBLIC to consider these things; they're trivial in comparison to eg charging infrastructure.
As I mentioned in my other post. With nickel the demand from other industries is also growing and batteries need high grade. Of high grade nickel is a lot and gathering high grade from current mines coming online is an issue.
However, nickel is the most unlikely to actually cause shortages, but it is still a price risk.
> The majority of spheroidal graphite for batteries is synthetically produced because it has better performance. It can be made trivially from virtually any carbon source, including biofuels.
Natural is usually cheaper and with extreme price pressure you will see that many car makers want to continue to use natural even if its worse in some aspects. The predicted split is about 50/50 this decade. Again, this is price risk.
> Lithium is more common than lead. Mines are coming. It is set to be wildly oversupplied.
You are disagreeing with all expert forecast on the topic. Are you an expert on the field? What is your qualification. If its so easy why are the mines not already here?
There are literally 100+ battery factory in production, all need huge amount of lithium. If you look at all major lithium producers and their expansion plans, its way below that need.
> It's not important for the PUBLIC to consider these things; they're trivial in comparison to eg charging infrastructure.
Of course no supply chain issues are public issues. But that doesn't mean it wont impact the public.
Why can't journalists use units correctly? I'm assuming the above is per year (but who knows?).
Side remark: it's actually kind of cool that you can literally specify the battery output of these factories in Watts.