[Martinjlm]

Originally Posted by snizzle

The real problem is that we don't have enough lithium, nickel, manganese, and cobalt to make them anyway if all these automakers are true to their word.

Not true. It’s sorta like when people were saying “we’re gonna run out of oil by {pick a date}”. What they may have meant was “we ‘re gonna run out of easily attainable oil by {pick a date}”. Then better ways of getting to the “hard to get” oil were developed and, voila! The US is now a net exporter of oil. Lithium is plentiful. Even if it wasn’t, lithium accounts for less than 2% of the material content of a lithium ion battery. Nickel and cobalt are elements that are actually byproducts of mining other elements. Just suddenly they are now more valuable than the other elements. Not sure about manganese, other than the fact that it is also used in very small amounts per battery. I worry more about neodymium and dysprosium used in the manufacture of magnets for electric motors. Most of the deposits of those two metals are found in China. There’s a lot of development work going on to figure out how to make efficient motors without using neodymium and dysprosium.