"Not only the lithium may not be enough, but the concentration of the mining of lithium may create other geopolitical issues"
You mean vs fossil fuels? ... Lithium is available about everywhere
Legacy auto CEO want to gain time since time running their existing fossil car factories is money to their shareholders but well at some point we have to stop all this which does not help climate change ...
Stellantis has already been selling hundreds of thousands of BEVs in the last couple of years and changing the entire offer of several brands they own, a process they are gonna complete in a few years, namely 3/4.
They also have a strong position on commercial vehicles as well.
Their position is everything but weak, considering they are indeed a "legacy automaker".
The Chrysler part of what became Stellantis was incredibly behind EV. Part of why Stellantis exists in the first place is because they knew they would simply die without having a partner for EV stuff. The European part of that new company had some EV stuff but they are not actually considered market leader by literally anybody and they are mostly in Europe.
It's the legacy supply chain that's causing this talk.
You've got companies who have made cars for a 100 years. They have supply chains dating back almost as long. It's really hard in a personal, business and political sense to say "sorry value chain, you're redundant" to people and companies your company has been in business for longer than you've been alive.
There are whole industries who aren't just needed any more when electric engines become more commonplace. Most of them can pivot to making something else, but some can't or won't.
Carlos Tavares has been criticising the switch to electric for years, and regularly calls it in interview "that technology that has been forced on us". He's been spreading FUD on electric all over the French media for a while now.
This discourse is the reason I'm not going to buy an electric Peugeot anytime soon even though I've always been satisfied with their ICE cars and the electric 208/308/408 are some of the best looking electric cars today IMO.
But I can't buy an electric car if the CEO himself says he doesn't like electric and wouldn't have done it if he wasn't forced to.
One could also say he's in a very informed position to criticise the (mandatory in EU) switch to EVs from. Who's more of an expert on the subject than the CEO of a major auto group that sells a good portion of both combustion and EV automobiles?
Lithium may be available everywhere, but it doesn't mean we're producing it in a consumable way.
We're producing about 130kt of lithium. Assuming 75kg of lithium per car battery, that's about 2mil cars/year. We produce around 60mil cars/year currently.
75kg?? Where are you getting that figure? Most common figure is around 160 grams of lithium metal per kWh (you can do better, as the theoretical minimum is half that, and some DO do better). Base Model 3 is around 60kWh (giving it about a 250 mile range), so just under 10kg per car, so even your 130kT/year gives us 13 million cars per year.
Obviously we're not going to be mining a whole bunch more lithium than we currently use. This is obvious, so saying that if we use more lithium we'll need to mine more lithium is just a tautology and is no useful insight at all!
Good thing the specific energy density of lithium is only critical in portable storage, grid level storage has lots of other options from alternative chemistries, compressed gasses, thermal storage, and even possibly hydrogen fuel cells.
Plus one of those shiny new pickup trucks probably uses 20 times the raw material that an electric scooter does. As usual "we don't have enough" for everyone to live like the US "so just accept the injustice while we have it all".
It is known that the current drive to battery EVs has a number of issues. He also makes a good point that it may not be pragmatic to focus on a single technology at this point instead of being open and neutral and to see what ends up working best.
Production of batteries has indeed issues, from mining to geopolitics. Recycling of batteries also faces issues. More broadly, with the deadlines set by governments, electricity production and required updates to national grids are clearly lagging behind everywhere. These are actual problems are they must be faced, not brushed under the carpet.
I don't think calling attention to the speaker's unarguable taint and bias is "unproductive." On the contrary, such details are important for a reasoned and skeptical perspective.
When FUD is being used (yes, it does happen!), we should call it by its name.
>He also makes a good point that it may not be pragmatic to focus on a single technology at this point instead of being open and neutral and to see what ends up working best.
I don't see how the EV industry is focusing on a single technology. Battery chemistries can be swapped out in the same cans. Motor technology can be mix-and-match. Even power electronics has several different major technologies.
>Production of batteries has indeed issues, from mining to geopolitics.
The same can be said for literally all mined and/or energy products. Energy is power (in both senses), so this is just a tautology.
>Recycling of batteries also faces issues.
That's nothing compared to the "issues" recycling fossil fuels! (See: the e-fuel crowd)
Batteries can be infinitely recycled, and the materials get better with time. Current technology recovers over 95% of the raw material, and the output is suitable for turning into new batteries. Unlike most materials it's not 'downcycling' to lower grade material, in fact the impurities improve!
> electricity production and required updates to national grids are clearly lagging behind everywhere.
This is why you hook EVs to the internet, and use it to monitor the grid while charging and act accordingly. "Move bits not atoms."
Incidentally this list makes up the usual constellation of FUD arguments deployed against EVs for (literally) decades by legacy incumbents, so the anti-anti-FUD sentiment rings especially hollow.
You misread that. It's $5 of electricity. Nothing about the membrane, how long it lasts, any of the construction and maintenance costs, etc. And that's if that quote on the cost of electricity is remotely correct too.
And unless they have any of these facilities under construction, they're not going to contribute to supply issues in the next 3-5 years.
It seems that a typical battery might only need 5-75 kg Lithium.
So that would then be < $400 if your computation is correct. So even better. Even if this cost would be on top of existing costs this would still be not prohibitively expensive.
It's not FUD, but ironically your hot take (in attempting to dismiss it as FUD) is.
Lithium is fairly widely "available", but its extraction and processing both have serious externalities attached. When people talk about limits of lithium availability, that's ultimately what they're referring to.
Information about this is widely available. It's definitely not FUD.
Yes, in places like Serbia, very close to Europe. But feel free to tell the Serbs that they should have their ecosystem destroyed so that that Lithium can get dug out. [1]
For comparison, living close to an oil-well is much more manageable. Not ideal, but manageable.
Bear in mind that lithium can be extracted in much more environmentally friendly waves, where brine is extracted, filtered, and pumped back in [1]. I do have to wonder if such a process could ultimately be as efficient - and least invasive -- as an oil well.
I am not in the industry, nor do I have any stake in this, but reading that article reminded me of when a town built a expensive and perfectly good nuclear power plant just a vote at the last minute by the local community not to turn it on. (Trying to locate this but Google is failing me- I can find the link later, I think it's currently a museum or used for training now).
There is a lot of misinformation circling around with modern nuclear technology, and there is a lot of interest groups in the fossil fuel industry actively lobbying against it.
I'm curious if any of these environmental activists have ties to the fossil fuel industry.
For some perspective: their CEO also complained that they're losing money on EVs.
And frankly, their EVs are not good. Their charging speed is half the speed of Hyundai's. Their efficiency is half of Tesla's. Batteries 40% smaller than an MG4 in the same price range.
I've driven e208 and DS3, and in both of these the projected range was dropping by nearly 2 miles for every 1 mile driven. I presume they display the range using the marketing number, because the actual one doesn't look good.
This company is releasing a FWD-only Jeep built on the same platform as Opel/Vauxhall Corsa-e econobox, without upgrading the drive train. Their website even confuses kW with kWh: https://www.jeep.co.uk/jeep-avenger/electric The car's spec sheet shows size of the touch screen, but not the size of the battery (but from the advertised range, it's 46kWh like the rest of them). They're really unprepared and far behind EV-first car makers.
I don't expect Stellantis to survive the transition to EVs, and their CEO probably doesn't either.
Yea, it's reminiscent of Toyota's complaints. Tesla, GM, Ford, Volkswagen, Hyundai/Kia, BMW, and Renault/Nissan have put some weight behind electric vehicles as their future.
Toyota, Honda, and Stellantis are the large auto companies that haven't invested in EVs as much - and finding themselves as the odd three out in an industry that increasingly sees EVs as its future as countries start putting timelines on how long they'll allow combustion-engine vehicles. Stellantis merged together the 8th and 10th largest auto companies to make the 5th largest and they're staring down a future they haven't invested in. Toyota has been lobbying to stall EVs having bet hard on hydrogen vehicles which have never really gotten off the ground (https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/07/toyota-bet-wrong-on-evs...).
It is possible that EVs won't be the future of the auto industry, but I wouldn't bet on that at this point. Most of the major players are moving to EVs and while the transition might seem slow to some people, it's looking somewhat inevitable. Toyota's investment in hydrogen cars hasn't paid off and their reluctance to pivot has put them behind. Stellantis seems to be in a similar position.
I don't know about Ford, since you mention them.
"First of all, batteries are the constraint here," Ford CEO Jim Farley told Yahoo Finance. "Both lithium and nickel are really the key constraining commodities. We normally get those from all over the world — South America, Africa, Indonesia. We want to localize that in North America, not just the mining but the processing of the materials."
Seems to me he's saying pretty much the same thing as Tavares. It's kinda strange, considering they're competitors.
I'm assuming Toyota and Honda are hedging more than the other companies because they have the luxury of doing so. They both have well-earned reputations for making the most reliable ICE vehicles on the road. Ford, GM, Nissan, and BMW have the opposite reputation. Maybe the don't see this generation of EVs as a worthwhile investment and/or feel they can catch up rapidly when the need is greater and not need to invest so much before that point.
Stellantis is in the odd group who is well-behind the EV curve and makes unreliable ICE vehicles.
Toyota could potentially become a leader in the space if their R&D in to solid state batteries pans out. The way I see it, EV's are currently in their "2nd generation". The 1st gen was the Tesla Roadster and a bunch of other proof of concepts. Now we are in the 2nd gen making cars with rather inefficient and heavy battery packs. In order for the world to electrify, we need to move to the "3rd generation" or EV's that will hopefully solve the issues around batteries.
> We have right now 1.3 billion cars (that are) internal combustion engine powered on the planet. We need to replace that with clean mobility.
If by "clean mobility" he means "more cars", then I'd ask: why?
These analyses are based on replacing all current ICE cars 1:1 with equivalent BEV. Why? Smaller personal vehicles, (electric) bicycles, public transport, better train infrastructure, car sharing are all alternatives to having the same number of cars on the roads.
> Our societies are losing a lot of great potential by not having a technology-neutral regulations.
hahahaha. "technology-neutral regulations"? As long as different technologies have different effects on the world, there is no such thing as "technology-neutral" regulation. You cannot say all cars are equal if your objective is to have clean air and less CO2 emissions.
> If by "clean mobility" he means "more cars", then I'd ask: why? These analyses are based on replacing all current ICE cars 1:1 with equivalent BEV. Why? Smaller personal vehicles, (electric) bicycles, public transport, better train infrastructure, car sharing are all alternatives to having the same number of cars on the roads.
I 100% agree with that but I see absolutely no push in that direction, if anything EVs are following the trend and are larger/heavier
The long term ecological goals are diametrically opposed to consumerism which is the driving force of the global economy for a long while now. We need people to buy shit, selling a bicycle instead of a 70k$ EV is bad in that regard
A carbon tax would be technologically neutral compared to the patchwork of mandates and such we have now. It would also be substantially more efficient.
Remember Peak Oil? It has been wrong during the whole industrial period, in which civilization has run on fossil fuels and worked relentlessly to extract more.
Now we have CEOs who know only the fossil fuel supply chain announcing Peak Lithium before civilization has even tried to extract and use it at scale.
This guy seems well-intentioned, but he doesn't seem to understand what civilizational change looks like.
Yes and at some point the sun will destroy earth. If Peak oil just means 'all resources are limited' then its an insight that an empty bottle of water could have made. It has no relevance for the real world.
Doomsday preachers would love your argument here. They've been wrong over and over, but doomsday is eventually coming! The sun will explode, heat death of the universe... sooner or later, something will spell doom for the human race. Doomsday isn't wrong, it's inevitable!
Lithium is abundant yes but it's a rare earth metal which doesn't mean it's actually rare but that the ore content is super low. Meaning practically speaking you have to move a whole lot of earth to get a little bit of lithium.
This makes a lot of extractions very difficult for ecological reasons.
Its so fucking funny when I hear this argument. In the country where I live public transport gives you actual freedom. Like the freedom to go out have a drink and go home even late at night without having a high chance of killing myself or others.
The reality is cars are an incredibly drag on personal finances and a huge driver of personal debt, and relaying on walking, biking and public transit would give these people a much higher chance of escaping from poverty.
The idea that you can't have good transport without cars in sububran environments is just idiotic. Like maybe if you are talking about endless soulless American style sprawl but even then its just difficult not impossible.
Connecting rural communities by trains and buses is also mostly possible. People might still need a small car, but having access to public transit is still a great thing that would help people.
> Forcing everyone to use fixed transport locks their job prospects and keeps them dependent on corporations and government entities.
1. "Fixed transport" can be faster and more convenient to get to places than Individual transport. Subways in Vienna go on a 2-minute cadence and you can reach the entire city quickly and conveniently. Compare that to the hellscape that is "individual travel" in LA, where you're always going to be stuck in traffic and not getting anywhere fast. It's isolating to the point where people from different neighborhoods don't hang out with each other because the transport is so inefficient.
My tiny village of 800 people in the east of Austria has trains to both my countries and to two other countries' capitals every half hour.
Public transport doesn't need to be shitty. It's just held back by backwards thinking in the US.
2. Cars keep you even more dependent on corporations and government entities.
The roads you're driving on? Government.
The gas you're buying? Some of the biggest and most evil corporations in the world.
The car itself? Big corporations.
Even if it was true, it could have been alleviated by 1) expanding public transportation 2) electrifying it, or building electrical from the start. Subway, buses, regional trains, trams, and so on.
Readit News
"Not only the lithium may not be enough, but the concentration of the mining of lithium may create other geopolitical issues"
You mean vs fossil fuels? ... Lithium is available about everywhere
Legacy auto CEO want to gain time since time running their existing fossil car factories is money to their shareholders but well at some point we have to stop all this which does not help climate change ...
Stellantis has already been selling hundreds of thousands of BEVs in the last couple of years and changing the entire offer of several brands they own, a process they are gonna complete in a few years, namely 3/4.
They also have a strong position on commercial vehicles as well.
Their position is everything but weak, considering they are indeed a "legacy automaker".
You've got companies who have made cars for a 100 years. They have supply chains dating back almost as long. It's really hard in a personal, business and political sense to say "sorry value chain, you're redundant" to people and companies your company has been in business for longer than you've been alive.
There are whole industries who aren't just needed any more when electric engines become more commonplace. Most of them can pivot to making something else, but some can't or won't.
Applies in all sorts of situations.
They seem to have no issue about saying this to employees lately…
This discourse is the reason I'm not going to buy an electric Peugeot anytime soon even though I've always been satisfied with their ICE cars and the electric 208/308/408 are some of the best looking electric cars today IMO.
But I can't buy an electric car if the CEO himself says he doesn't like electric and wouldn't have done it if he wasn't forced to.
(I'm a PHEV proponent myself)
We're producing about 130kt of lithium. Assuming 75kg of lithium per car battery, that's about 2mil cars/year. We produce around 60mil cars/year currently.
That's not including any other lithium use.
Obviously we're not going to be mining a whole bunch more lithium than we currently use. This is obvious, so saying that if we use more lithium we'll need to mine more lithium is just a tautology and is no useful insight at all!
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It is known that the current drive to battery EVs has a number of issues. He also makes a good point that it may not be pragmatic to focus on a single technology at this point instead of being open and neutral and to see what ends up working best.
Production of batteries has indeed issues, from mining to geopolitics. Recycling of batteries also faces issues. More broadly, with the deadlines set by governments, electricity production and required updates to national grids are clearly lagging behind everywhere. These are actual problems are they must be faced, not brushed under the carpet.
I don't think calling attention to the speaker's unarguable taint and bias is "unproductive." On the contrary, such details are important for a reasoned and skeptical perspective.
When FUD is being used (yes, it does happen!), we should call it by its name.
>He also makes a good point that it may not be pragmatic to focus on a single technology at this point instead of being open and neutral and to see what ends up working best.
I don't see how the EV industry is focusing on a single technology. Battery chemistries can be swapped out in the same cans. Motor technology can be mix-and-match. Even power electronics has several different major technologies.
>Production of batteries has indeed issues, from mining to geopolitics.
The same can be said for literally all mined and/or energy products. Energy is power (in both senses), so this is just a tautology.
>Recycling of batteries also faces issues.
That's nothing compared to the "issues" recycling fossil fuels! (See: the e-fuel crowd)
Batteries can be infinitely recycled, and the materials get better with time. Current technology recovers over 95% of the raw material, and the output is suitable for turning into new batteries. Unlike most materials it's not 'downcycling' to lower grade material, in fact the impurities improve!
> electricity production and required updates to national grids are clearly lagging behind everywhere.
This is why you hook EVs to the internet, and use it to monitor the grid while charging and act accordingly. "Move bits not atoms."
Incidentally this list makes up the usual constellation of FUD arguments deployed against EVs for (literally) decades by legacy incumbents, so the anti-anti-FUD sentiment rings especially hollow.
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- Biggest EV batteries are about a ton
- Let‘s even assume they’re all lithium
- Lithium from seawater can be produced everywhere worldwide at about 5$ per kilo [1]
- That‘s 5k for a powerful battery lasting a decade.
- Seawater is as abundand as it gets.
-> Okay, this is really pure BS, and the only question remaining is which agenda is behind it
[1] https://electrek.co/2021/06/04/scientists-have-cost-effectiv...
And unless they have any of these facilities under construction, they're not going to contribute to supply issues in the next 3-5 years.
Battery and lithium breakthrough articles are a dime a dozen
So that would then be < $400 if your computation is correct. So even better. Even if this cost would be on top of existing costs this would still be not prohibitively expensive.
[0] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/dec/13/instagram-...
It's not FUD, but ironically your hot take (in attempting to dismiss it as FUD) is.
Lithium is fairly widely "available", but its extraction and processing both have serious externalities attached. When people talk about limits of lithium availability, that's ultimately what they're referring to.
Information about this is widely available. It's definitely not FUD.
Yes, in places like Serbia, very close to Europe. But feel free to tell the Serbs that they should have their ecosystem destroyed so that that Lithium can get dug out. [1]
For comparison, living close to an oil-well is much more manageable. Not ideal, but manageable.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60081853
Very close, since it is inside.
As opposed to fossil-fuel global warming that threatens to destroy their ecosystems as well?
Just proactively enact aggressive environmental laws that force Lithium extraction to be environmentally sound.
Also this articles says literally nothing about how exactly the environment would be destroyed.
I am not in the industry, nor do I have any stake in this, but reading that article reminded me of when a town built a expensive and perfectly good nuclear power plant just a vote at the last minute by the local community not to turn it on. (Trying to locate this but Google is failing me- I can find the link later, I think it's currently a museum or used for training now).
There is a lot of misinformation circling around with modern nuclear technology, and there is a lot of interest groups in the fossil fuel industry actively lobbying against it.
I'm curious if any of these environmental activists have ties to the fossil fuel industry.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54900418
And frankly, their EVs are not good. Their charging speed is half the speed of Hyundai's. Their efficiency is half of Tesla's. Batteries 40% smaller than an MG4 in the same price range.
I've driven e208 and DS3, and in both of these the projected range was dropping by nearly 2 miles for every 1 mile driven. I presume they display the range using the marketing number, because the actual one doesn't look good.
This company is releasing a FWD-only Jeep built on the same platform as Opel/Vauxhall Corsa-e econobox, without upgrading the drive train. Their website even confuses kW with kWh: https://www.jeep.co.uk/jeep-avenger/electric The car's spec sheet shows size of the touch screen, but not the size of the battery (but from the advertised range, it's 46kWh like the rest of them). They're really unprepared and far behind EV-first car makers.
I don't expect Stellantis to survive the transition to EVs, and their CEO probably doesn't either.
Toyota, Honda, and Stellantis are the large auto companies that haven't invested in EVs as much - and finding themselves as the odd three out in an industry that increasingly sees EVs as its future as countries start putting timelines on how long they'll allow combustion-engine vehicles. Stellantis merged together the 8th and 10th largest auto companies to make the 5th largest and they're staring down a future they haven't invested in. Toyota has been lobbying to stall EVs having bet hard on hydrogen vehicles which have never really gotten off the ground (https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/07/toyota-bet-wrong-on-evs...).
It is possible that EVs won't be the future of the auto industry, but I wouldn't bet on that at this point. Most of the major players are moving to EVs and while the transition might seem slow to some people, it's looking somewhat inevitable. Toyota's investment in hydrogen cars hasn't paid off and their reluctance to pivot has put them behind. Stellantis seems to be in a similar position.
Stellantis is in the odd group who is well-behind the EV curve and makes unreliable ICE vehicles.
If by "clean mobility" he means "more cars", then I'd ask: why? These analyses are based on replacing all current ICE cars 1:1 with equivalent BEV. Why? Smaller personal vehicles, (electric) bicycles, public transport, better train infrastructure, car sharing are all alternatives to having the same number of cars on the roads.
> Our societies are losing a lot of great potential by not having a technology-neutral regulations.
hahahaha. "technology-neutral regulations"? As long as different technologies have different effects on the world, there is no such thing as "technology-neutral" regulation. You cannot say all cars are equal if your objective is to have clean air and less CO2 emissions.
I 100% agree with that but I see absolutely no push in that direction, if anything EVs are following the trend and are larger/heavier
The long term ecological goals are diametrically opposed to consumerism which is the driving force of the global economy for a long while now. We need people to buy shit, selling a bicycle instead of a 70k$ EV is bad in that regard
Now we have CEOs who know only the fossil fuel supply chain announcing Peak Lithium before civilization has even tried to extract and use it at scale.
This guy seems well-intentioned, but he doesn't seem to understand what civilizational change looks like.
It is a finite resource after all and if we don't reach a peak through depletion, climate change will force us to greatly reduce extraction.
Peak oil isn't wrong, it is inevitable.
This makes a lot of extractions very difficult for ecological reasons.
Forcing everyone to use fixed transport locks their job prospects and keeps them dependent on corporations and government entities.
It makes sense in urban areas, but not suburban nor rural, where forcing people to use public transport just keeps poor people poor.
The reality is cars are an incredibly drag on personal finances and a huge driver of personal debt, and relaying on walking, biking and public transit would give these people a much higher chance of escaping from poverty.
The idea that you can't have good transport without cars in sububran environments is just idiotic. Like maybe if you are talking about endless soulless American style sprawl but even then its just difficult not impossible.
Connecting rural communities by trains and buses is also mostly possible. People might still need a small car, but having access to public transit is still a great thing that would help people.
1. "Fixed transport" can be faster and more convenient to get to places than Individual transport. Subways in Vienna go on a 2-minute cadence and you can reach the entire city quickly and conveniently. Compare that to the hellscape that is "individual travel" in LA, where you're always going to be stuck in traffic and not getting anywhere fast. It's isolating to the point where people from different neighborhoods don't hang out with each other because the transport is so inefficient.
My tiny village of 800 people in the east of Austria has trains to both my countries and to two other countries' capitals every half hour.
Public transport doesn't need to be shitty. It's just held back by backwards thinking in the US.
2. Cars keep you even more dependent on corporations and government entities.
The roads you're driving on? Government. The gas you're buying? Some of the biggest and most evil corporations in the world. The car itself? Big corporations.
This is a very, very American take where people think they have a God-given right to live in these horrible and extremely inefficient suburbs.
Pretty much everywhere else the choice is "build more transit", which is actually not that difficult when there's political will.
The technology just isn't there yet, but that's the thing that will get rid of a lot of private car ownership eventually.
Their software team can’t even reliably control an automatic transmission!
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Why do we need to replace 1.3 billion engines instead of reducing the need for having them in the first place?
What if we reduce mobility by say 20%? Not only less cars of any kind but less infrastructure to build and maintain.