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Wow FUD really has no limit. "Not only the lithium may not be enough, but the concentration of the mining of lithium may create other geopolitical issues" You

• theshrike79 4y ago
  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.
  • mnky9800n 4y ago
    Some how, I just can't seem to mourn the loss.
    • rbanffy 4y ago
      Shareholders certainly don't
  • gadders 4y ago
    "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair Applies in all sorts of situations.
  • mathstuf 4y ago
    > It's really hard in a personal, business and political sense to say "sorry value chain, you're redundant" to people They seem to have no issue about saying this to employees lately…
    • rbanffy 4y ago
      I don't remember companies ever having an issue with that.
    • pie420 4y ago
      CEO's don't care about employees, but they do care about their CEO buddies who own engine parts manufacturers, and supply chain companies that they are heavily invested in.
  • lm28469 4y ago
    Plenty of people with no skin in the game also realize it's far from the green future they are promising...
• dzhiurgis 4y ago
  How come Toyota has been saying the same for years now?
  • anthonyskipper 4y ago
    Because they wanted hydrogen, not electric.
    • clouddrover 4y ago
      Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are electric vehicles.
      • rbanffy 4y ago
        Just not very practical ones.
      • pjc50 4y ago
        No, they're natural gas vehicles.
        • Incipient 4y ago
          They use hydrogen to produce electricity in a fuel cell, so are by definition, electric cars. Unlike natural gas which powers a car by combustion.
          • pjc50 4y ago
            The hydrogen comes from natural gas. (It can come from electrolysis, but in practice doesn't)
            • mrguyorama 4y ago
              By that accounting many BEVs aren't electric either.
          • 4y ago
• paganel 4y ago
  > Lithium is available about everywhere 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 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60081853
  • timeon 4y ago
    > Serbia, very close to Europe Very close, since it is inside.
    • paganel 4y ago
      Typo, wanted to write Western Europe, where most probably they'll build most of the battery factories.
  • ajdude 4y ago
    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. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54900418 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54900418
    • selimthegrim 4y ago
      You are thinking of Shoreham, on Long Island, NY.
• mytailorisrich 4y ago
  Can we please keep to a constructive discussion? 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.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • schiffern 4y ago
    >Can we please keep to a constructive discussion? 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.
• niclo 4y ago
  > Legacy auto CEO want to gain time 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".
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    I thought Stellantis was known for selling the lowest quality vehicles. Or rather, vehicles with the lowest quality to price ratio.
    • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      The edge between manufacturers is always very, very thin in cases where manufacturers are actually trying to directly compete with each other. But usually they're not. Cadillac and Audi both build performance sedans but they build them for different demographics, taste profiles and usage patterns and it shows. Cadillac has tried to build cars for Audi customers and Audi has tried to build cars for Cadillac customers and they've both mostly flopped and they've gone back to their own things. The marginal new car buyer who flip flops between brands doesn't really care about that stuff. They have specific and varied criteria they're using to choose. Everyone on the upper middle class internet shits on FCA because FCA's financing arm has no qualms about writing low end loans which run results in their cars being (when new) driven by people who on average are lower class and less well off than those of the "nicer" brands and FCA consciously builds cars to the price points those buyers want. This results in the cars generally being more clapped out for a given age/mileage on average than "nicer" brands which is then used to justify the shitting-on in a circular logic sort of way. This phenomena and set of feedback loops isn't specific to cars though. You see it used to justify purchases in all sorts of product classes.
      • llamajams 4y ago
        After a decade in the auto industry, I can confidently say that the difference (in quality) between FCA and others is not marginal. There is a severe lack of sound engineering during development and process control in manufacturing. All OEMs screw up, but FCA just manages to do it consistently.
• seszett 4y ago
  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.
  • olabyne 4y ago
    Yeah, it is quite ironic that Tavares is a known EV skeptic, but the e-208 is a best-seller in Europe already ...
  • zemvpferreira 4y ago
    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? (I'm a PHEV proponent myself)
    • Robotbeat 4y ago
      His group makes incredibly inefficient EVs. The Jeep Wrangler PHEV gets just 1.5 miles per kWh, compared 3.8 miles per kWh for the Tesla Model Y. Literally we'd need 2.5 times as much lithium to go all electric if we used his company's cars. The Wrangler PHEV is one of the few electric cars that is actually worse than an optimized gas-powered Prius in marginal emissions per electric mile driven (altho as we further decarbonize, this won't be true). Stellantis' electric technology, frankly, sucks. They give PHEVs a bad name (the Volt was awesome). And he has an incentive to not be forthright about it.
      • seszett 4y ago
        > The Jeep Wrangler PHEV gets just 1.5 miles per kWh, compared 3.8 miles per kWh for the Tesla Model Y. I don't know anything about Jeep, but the e308 is supposed to be at... 5 miles per kWh? If I'm correct at converting from 12.7 kwh/100 km.
• endymi0n 4y ago
  Let‘s do the napkin math: - 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-effectively-harvested-lithium-from-seawater/ https://electrek.co/2021/06/04/scientists-have-cost-effectiv...
  • quonn 4y ago
    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. [0] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/dec/13/instagram-posts/instagram-post-misleads-about-lithium-mining-and-t/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/dec/13/instagram-...
  • lm28469 4y ago
    That's a lot of "would" and "may" in the article. Battery and lithium breakthrough articles are a dime a dozen
  • Incipient 4y ago
    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.
• juujian 4y ago
  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".
• Incipient 4y ago
  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. That's not including any other lithium use.
  • pjc50 4y ago
    I wonder how much goes into disposable vape batteries.
  • yread 4y ago
    Multiple mines will come online this year and next (for example Cinovec in EU with ~30kt/year)
    • Robotbeat 4y ago
      Yup. "Wow, if we use more lithium, we'll need to produce more lithium! This is such an insightful comment and not at all tautological..."
  • Robotbeat 4y ago
    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!
    • Incipient 4y ago
      That number I had been referencing was incorrectly lithium carbonate. Misquoted on some EV website. My apologies! Definitely a lot less of a gap, but still a huge increase in the entire supply chain needed, very quickly.
• drumhead 4y ago
  What about something like copper for wiring?
• lisasays 4y ago
  Wow FUD really has no limit. 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.