6 ms·

You can’t compare the two. Most open pit gold mines average 2-4g/tonne or 0.0002%

• lm28469 5y ago
  It's ok because we don't need 10kg of gold per car battery, with 1.5b vehicles on earth that adds up quickly. Gold is still mostly used for jewelry and investment, its rarity and price aren't really a problem for these, quite the contrary
  • maxsilver 5y ago
    We don't really need all of that for cars either. We could build 5 or 6 Chevy Volts with the same battery capacity as a single Tesla, and each of those Volts (with daily charging) would still almost never need to burn gas. (I'm the second owner of my Chevy Volt, with 60,000k miles on it, it has a real-world car-recorded all-lifetime average of 181 MPG). We're building every EV car to handle every possible EV-only road trip because we can and because it's cool, not because it's actually necessary. We could still eliminate 90%+ of all road emissions instantly with just PHEV's using much smaller batteries, if some sort of lithium shortage made such a thing necessary.
    • HPsquared 5y ago
      It comes down to economics, whether or not it costs more to add an internal combustion engine, ancillaries, generator etc. than it does for the additional battery cells.
  • rmm 5y ago
    I used gold as a random example. Highest grade copper mines 3-4% Zinc mines and other base metals sit at 2-3%
  • HPsquared 5y ago
    You don't need 10kg of gold, but you do need about 5g of platinum group metals for the catalytic converter. Not sure how many tonnes of rock that is, and how it compares to electric car batteries, but it's not nothing.