Volvo Trucks to launch full range of electric trucks in Europe in 2021
reuters.com
reuters.com
What companies like Tesla do is driving the hype for the sake of stock market, which is wrong - the target should be users of vehicles and the purpose they were purposed for.
I would choose the Volvo over any newage design with huge waste of space for transport - they are meant to be a TRANSPORT vehicles not a design for driving to a shopping mall picking chicks (that dont care about transport vehicle anyway).
And Volvo did it right. Targeting purpose, targeting users and business. Congrats. Finally.
In Europe vehicle footprint is a big deal and for a box truck, minimizing vehicle footprint (and maximizing capacity) is likely more important than reducing drag. Particularly when you are looking at vehicles which will likely spend most of their time pushing 16+ tons and accelerating and decelerating to speeds around 30 MPH all day long.
> you need serious charging infrastructure if you are going to be charging a Semi every 250 - 300 km.
These trucks aren't designed for long haul/ cross country trips. There won't be charging every 250 km, they will go out, do their job, come home and park on a charger.
Reason conversion to electric happened earlier for golf carts was electric golf carts only have about 4-5kwh worth of batteries. Interestingly historically lead acid batteries are about $100-150 per kwr. Which is close to where automotive grade lion batteries are now.
So no surprise that delivery trucks are converting to electric. They have the exact some scenario going on.
He also owns several electric golf-carts he's tunes up for speed and light 4WD.
Fixed gears and electric motors life spans are between 25,000 and 50,000 hours. Vs less than 10,000 hours for a piston engine.
Everything about cars is designed around that fact that the engine is shot after 200-250,000 miles. Would not surprise me if eventually the expected life of an EV will end up being 2 to 3 times longer.
Technical development might have some impact as well. I remember as a kid many trucks needing bigger engines (e.g. sand or concrete transport) had the cab-behind-engine layout, but nowadays those are more or less completely gone. Maybe turbochargers and intercoolers allowed a sufficiently powerful engine in the cab-above-engine layout?
The entire Nordics allow 25m (83 ft) trucks up to 60 tons.
For a buyer of semis, the cost of running one is arguably the most important factor. Producers need to focus on $ / km and there range is quite important (as well as charging infrastructure)
You might have heard of UPS? FedEx? Amazon? Maybe you've had a contractor work on your home or business?
All of these businesses operate on less than 180 miles round trips per day typically inside the US. In Europe distances tend to be even shorter.
Semis are by nature long haul. It's rare to see semis pulling 40 foot trailers through urban areas even in the US. Semis are usually limited to long haul or short haul freight from industrial or agricultural areas. The Volvo trucks are designed to operate locally and it's a huge market.
> For a buyer of semis, the cost of running one is arguably the most important factor.
There is definitely a market for semis—particularly in the US—but it's a vastly different market than what this targets.
Yes but you are referring to the small urban trucks used in last mile deliveries. The article mentions heavy duty trucks. Even in the last mile delivery case, a limited 300km range is a problem because that means the same truck cannot be shared by workers in following shifts. Or maybe operate autonomously 24/7.
We don't have to guess. If you go to Volvo's site, you can see exactly what sort of trucks they are talking about. We're talking about:
=> "A two-axle truck with a gross vehicle weight up to 16 tonnes and an excellent working environment for the driver. Volvo Trucks can deliver complete vehicles for urban transport like deliveries."
AND
=> "A three-axle truck with a gross vehicle weight up to 27 tonnes and a comfortable working environment for the driver. Volvo Trucks can deliver complete vehicles for demanding types of urban transport like waste collection, light construction transports and deliveries."
https://www.volvotrucks.com/en-en/trucks/alternative-fuels/e...
> Even in the last mile delivery case, a limited 300km range is a problem because that means the same truck cannot be shared by workers in following shifts.
Pretty much all delivery companies have sub 12 hour routes which run during business hours and into the evening. There is very little demand for package delivery at 2am. Likewise, construction is a 9-5 sort of job. Garbage collection (which is specifically mentioned) is almost always a once/ per day route.
I'm sure there is demand for autonomous 24/7 vehicles out there, but there are also plenty of commercial vehicles which are parked over night as well.
> => "A two-axle truck with a gross vehicle weight up to 16 tonnes and an excellent working environment for the driver. Volvo Trucks can deliver complete vehicles for urban transport like deliveries."
This is still significantly heavier than what most courier companies like FedEx and DHL use; within Europe most use Ford Transits and similar, which have a maximum gross weight of 3.5t (this is partly due to licensing; these vehicles can be driven on a normal "car" driving license).
I don't live in Europe, but I'm inclined to take Volvo at face value on this.
Note that within the EU, in general "large goods vehicle" licenses cover everything over 3.5 tonnes, so these Volvo trucks are _well_ into that category. Package delivery companies avoid such large vehicles for last-mile deliveries.
But yes, two-axle trucks like what Volvo is proposing do of course see heavy usage for deliveries in commercial/industrial settings. Most smaller supermarkets are supplied by such trucks, for example, especially within cities (where loading bays are rare).
Again, look at Volvo's site. They understand this market, they've been in it for 50+ years.
Long haul trucking is still out of reach of batteries, it seems.
Europe is much denser when comapared to US. You can do a lot within 300KM in Europe. Volvo openly states that the trucks are "to be used for regional transport and urban construction operations in Europe".
The trucks in question and the possible range is very well suited to this kind of operation.
Also, there's another important factor: Noise. Some European countries are more sensitive to noise than others. The Netherlands and Sweden comes to my mind.
These trucks will be a huge win on that front because a 44 tonne truck is not exactly silent, especially under load.
Volvo has a way to go if they want to compete in this market.
Noise wont have any effect as it is not government regulated. A buyer of Semis wont think twice about noice if $ / km is lower.
There have been many very aerodynamic conventionally contoured gasoline powered cars, including one of my favorites, the Mazda MX-6 Mystere.
I've heard this too, but while Chevy and Nissan went the exotic route, every Tesla so far has been fairly normal looking. There were nice-things on them like the gull-wing doors and the handles on the Model S, but those were contained in a traditional design.
The CyberTruck will obviously break that mold, but I suspect that much of the look of the CyberTruck is to keep costs down and efficiency up. It is extremely difficult to make a traditional pickup truck efficient.
The door handles are not an EV design cue at all. They are only on 2 Teslas and no other EVs. They are meant to look and feel luxurious and futuristic and would not be out-of-place on any higher end car. Like the gull-wing doors, I suspect they were done that way because Musk thought they would look cool.
Or at least that's how the stereotypes go. Fancy styling didn't work for them for the same reason that Hyundai is having a hard time convincing people Genesis is actually a luxury brand. Buying something as a signal doesn't work very well when the signal is conflicting.
I would choose whichever makes sense for my business. Without pricing and reliability numbers, it's impossible to know which that might be.
The closest vehicle in Tesla's garage to this is the Tesla Cybertruck which looks bizarre, but is about $20,000 less than the nearest announced competitor. If Tesla launched a butt ugly Cybervan which was similarly functional and cost effective, you can bet it would be popular with the class of buyer who are shopping for e-Vans.
Right now I'm eyeballing the Cybertruck personally, in spite of it's appearance. Spending $20k to get a more traditional looking truck just doesn't make sense to me. The only concern I have is whether those high truck bed walls will screw things up.
No, Cybertruck is competing with stuff like Ford F150. Volvo FH is a commercial truck. The nearest thing is the Tesla Semi.
Tesla has also hinted at a passenger van eventually... but again no date, no details.
Production starts sometime in 2021 with scale production probably in 2022.
Production of Semi was supposed to start this year. According to Musk it was delayed because Tesla is still starved for batteries (a single semi consumes the same amount of cells as 10-20 Model 3 cars)
Cell bottleneck will be solved with the new battery production system recently demonstrated at battery day.
Tesla hints many things. They need to figure out their supply chain. Commercial fleets require maintenance and spare parts.
Yep. But this is mitigated a bit by the fact that EVs tend to require massively less maintenance and spare parts.
From what I've seen, Tesla does not do service really well and that's something they will have to get down if they are going to get into commercial vehicles. Even if Tesla trucks require vastly less ongoing service, they need to have that service be good. I've heard of Tesla owners having to wait several weeks for parts, for a commercial vehicle that's a no-go.
EVs should have a substantial advantage over trucks in the brake wear department, battery overhaul costs will match or possibly be lower than the engine overhaul costs.
Put it all together and for short haul trips EVs should have an advantage and for the longer haul they are as yet impractical. Keep in mind that a 1000 liter fuel reserve is a substantial amount of energy for relatively little weight disadvantage on a vehicle that already weighs 8 tons, the equivalent in batteries weighs many times more. Some of this weight disadvantage will be compensated by regenerative braking, with a diesel vehicle that energy is converted to waste heat every time the vehicle comes to a stop.
So, overall, I think short haul EV trucks will have the edge soon, long haul it likely will be diesel for quite a while to come.
Tesla has a history of claiming their products will be cheaper than they turn out to be. Pretty big claim to say it's cheaper when, as of now, they haven't produced or sold a single truck. I guess it works though, because every time a competitor puts an EV truck out there, someone inevitably claims that the Cybertruck is cheaper.
If the Cybertruck also ends up 15% more expensive than the original advertised price, it'll still cost dramatically less than any competitor.
They've taken pre-orders and accepted cash, it's a contract. Tesla will sell those trucks for the announced prices.
Even using $38k as the base price of the Model 3[1], it is still a good value compared to competing electric vehicles which tend to have much lower ranges, slower charging networks, and worse performance. The Model Y competitors are also generally more expensive and have lower ranges.
They are still a bit pricy compared to non-EVs, but compared to other EVs, Teslas are not priced at a premium. If you value performance, the gap is even more significant.
> I guess it works though, because every time a competitor puts an EV truck out there, someone inevitably claims that the Cybertruck is cheaper.
It works because as I mention above, Tesla has a track record of delivering decent value. It is extremely fair to say Tesla vehicles are often behind schedule, but their pricing (again compared to other EVs) is usually extremely competitive.
[1] It was possible for quite a while to get a Model 3 for $35k, it was just a little tricky without a pre-order.
Tesla will have at least some commercial trucks. Whether they will compete directly with this or not remains to be seen. I suspect if they do, they will be price competitive for reasons in my post above.
Personally I hate marmite but love the truck!
I had 2 Nissan LEAF from 2013-2018 and was keenly aware that I was enjoying a piece of the future. Part of the experience was simply revolutionary: quietness, no gas station, amazing torque.
At the same time, being an early adopter had a steep cost: limited range, limited charging options outside of home. (As it turned out, that cost turned out to be less steep than perceived, and simple planning made it pretty much a non-issue.)
This is obviously a generalization and there are exceptions but there seems to be a large overlap between those willing to have a radically different product that comes with severe drawbacks, and those who enjoy the quirkyness of it. And yes: the status (even if it's a subconscious thing for most people).
It's worth noting that the 2019 Nissan LEAF was redesigned to look like regular cars, just as its battery doubled in capacity (tripled if you compare from the first models). It signaled that it was no longer cutting edge and ready for mainstream. Anecdotally, tax agencies agreed as most tax incentives were either dropped or severely reduced around that time.
It's part of Scandinavian culture and its aesthetic.
Maybe.
Tesla used to do that - Model S or Model 3 follow that idea. And that was big part of their success - cars, that look like cars (remember all fugly EVs in 2010s?), with few quirks here and there, but nothing out of ordinary. But as a company, they depart from this idea with things like cybertruck, and are focusing more on hype over last few years.
Tesla wasn’t the first with production BEVs, either. Or first with any kind of EV, production or not. Companies built them anyway.
"The Tesla Semi’s drag coefficient of 0.36 is lower than today’s trucks at 0.65 to 0.7, and even lower than the Bugatti Chiron at 0.38, one of the world’s fastest sports cars" [1].
Objects with good drag coefficients are usually good looking, or are not hard to make good looking (while not so true for the other way around).
[1]: https://www.machinedesign.com/mechanical-motion-systems/arti...
Compare it to a normal car instead, and it's the equivalent of an old Chevy Tahoe and far worse than normal saloon cars which are typically at 0.29ish.
That's extremely reductive & vague.
The #1 design consideration for teslas is safety.
https://www.volvotrucks.com/en-en/trucks/alternative-fuels/e...
They appear to be in the testing stage
Honestly one of the bigger issues is upgrading the electrical service at the depots to support the chargers. I worked on a prototype EV truck, and they had to software-limit the charger when first installed, because running flat-out it could draw more power than the entire rest of the prototype facility. They had to get the utility out to drop a new transformer before they could unleash the charger's full power.
The power you buy in a few gallons of diesel fuel is simply staggering.
1 Liter per second ~= 38.6 megawatts, for diesel.
I’ve never bothered paying attention to the flow rate in a fuel station, but it’s really fortunate that electric cars are fundamentally more efficient than combustion engines.
> Image result for gas station pump flow rate Light passenger vehicle pump up to about 50 litres (13 US gallons) per minute (the United States limits this to 10 US gallons (38 litres) per minute); pumps serving trucks and other large vehicles have a higher flow rate, up to 130 litres (34 US gallons) per minute in the UK. and 40 US gallons (150 litres) in the US.
So roughly 80 megawatts coming out of that diesel nozzle. Most impressive!
I've heard of CCS chargers in development that'll push 350kW (920V, 500A), which involves crazy stuff like liquid-cooled connectors. They flow 3M Novec through the cable.: https://ittcannon.com/core/medialibrary/ittcannon/website/li...
Pretty much any time fissionable material is moved probably beats it.
But yes, hydrocarbon chains are damned energy dense for chemical reactions.
Secondly, battery swapping architecture of a vehicle makes it significantly heavier specially wants you consider battery packs or even cells with structural loads to make the vehicle lighter. For one personal luxury car that might be fine, but if you are operating 150+ trucks for 20 years, that adds up to a lot of missed payloads.
This is exactly why Tesla, dropped this idea. JB Struble just gave a nice analysis of this at a Standford talk.
Also, trucks, will spend some time on break and more time loading and unloading. During that time you can charge them or top them off.
If my truck are loading/unloading they are probably doing it at customer facilities so charging is unlikely to be an option. If they are loading/unloading at my facility then I can swap the battery pack at the same time.
Funny then that many large companies disagree with you have have order literally 100s of electric trucks from Tesla.
> If you try to tell me that your load-bearing conformal battery packs that are critical to making the truck move
For a truck, you are gone have body-on-frame anyway so the battery would probably not be structural. And it wouldn't be 'critical' to make the truck move, it would be a weight optimization.
> If my truck are loading/unloading they are probably doing it at customer facilities so charging is unlikely to be an option.
Lots of companies transport thing between their own facilities and lots of companies have long term costumers. Adding the charging equipment is relativity cheap and could be built to you.
> If they are loading/unloading at my facility then I can swap the battery pack at the same time.
Go check out how complex these battery swapping robots actually are. Having those at your facility is very costly and need a lot of space. The are prone to break down because they mechanical machines are moving around heavy batteries.
Also, so far nobody has even demonstrated this type of battery swap device for a large truck. Current system drop the battery from under the vehicle, this however is not possible in a body-on-frame construction, and a different method would have to be found. Non of the electric truck vendors have announced or even talked about such a system.
There was a promo/concept video a few years back, from Tesla I think, showing cars pulling up into a battery swap station and a door slid open in the floor beneath the car and a contraption automatically swapped out the battery for a fully charged one without the driver leaving the car. Not sure whatever came of that concept.
Hugely increased complexity since the battery needs to have all mounting points easily accessed in any condition, rain, snow, ice buildup, whatever, from the outside and all the other accessing geometry forcing the design of the entire vehicle to allow for it.
Combine this with battery technology improving allowing faster charging speeds lessening the impact. Like phones fast-charging today. No point having a spare battery when 15-30 mins in a charger easily gives you all the hours you need.
Where I live we've had completely electric busses on a line for a few years now (Actually Volvos). Very different use case but also commercial vehicles with similar run hours. They have automatic over-head charging at the ends, filling up enough with a 10 minute stop to run throughout the day. Some longer lines are using hybrids with the same charging technology. They run most of the line entirely on battery power, only kicking in a smaller diesel when needed.
Maybe battery swapping makes sense for some specialized applications? But then I would guess just straight biofuels simply takes the cake, although eating the cost penalty.
“ZES (Zero Emission Services) supplies interchangeable energy containers for new and existing inland vessels. These containers – called ZESPacks – are charged using renewable power.”
I've seen other more permanent container solutions retrofitted on ships, though mostly passenger ferries with set schedules. Also only as auxiliary power allowing to eg. maneuver when docking without having to start another genset or capture excess energy from required gensets running in inefficient ranges.
Why should one of those boxes not be a giant 300kwh battery pack that they swap out at the multitude of weigh stations they have to stop at along the highway already? Just run massive power to the weigh stations, put in a few massive DC chargers and some forklifts.
Hell you could go further and have other parts of the drivetrain in there -- the controller, the charger unit, the DC to DC converter, etc. Then you have an upgrade path for the trucks as the tech improves.
At some point, the cost of the mechanisms and staff to swap the battery is more than the cost of the rest of a second vehicle.
JB Struble just gave a great analysis of this at a Standford talk where he explained why the dropped it.
It actually makes the vehicle more complex and importantly heavier.
It also prevents further improvement, Tesla just showed of their new Cell-to-Structure concept, where the cells themselves have load on them. This fundamentally is incompatible with fast swap. Such a architecture is really great because it negates the 'penalty' of carrying around a battery compared to an ICE vehicle. In fact you might end up lighter, because you don't have the heavy engine and the battery is not so much heavier then the structural steel you would have used otherwise.
You can charge trucks during breaks, or during loading and unloading.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-shuts-down-battery-swap-prog...
https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-batter...
Is there any video of the swaps actually working, outside of the promotional stage-show?
YouTube doesn't have anything, which is odd...
I'm sure this will change soon but until it does, there's still a lot of wasted transit time.
Was not disappointed. The Volvo page is very Volvo and the Tesla page is very Tesla.
I'm not a fan of pages that try to do the whole dynamic immersive full screen huge picture thing.
On the Volvo page, I do not see a single piece of information before I scroll. Instead I see fluff like "We know that many transport operators work hard to reduce the environmental footprint..."
On the Tesla page, I see four pieces of information right away. Acceleration, energy consumption, drag coefficient and that it has four independent motors.
Volvo’s ‘fluff’ at least hints at “this truck may be allowed to enter city centers” and “disability payments to drivers may go down”.
So ~33% of a truck's cost is spent on fuel.
I can't help to think that the existing manufacturers would not have had any incentive of offering electric trucks anytime soon, until Tesla announced their plans for the Tesla semi.
I am not in the transport business, but personally I am very happy to see electric trucks arrive in Europe. I live in a city and I can't stand the noise and stench of trucks with diesel engines. Not waking up from a noise of a diesel engine will seriously improve urban live.
Tesla is a huge benefactor of government credits and programs - not the reason for those programs. Competitors are not jumping in because the market is ready to pay unsubsidized prices for EVs, they're jumping in because the market will pay subsidized prices.
We're only just going to see what the EV landscape looks like in the next few years without the hefty hand of the government tilting the scales.
Electric vehicles are not new. Electric cars are as old as cars. The first car to reach 100km/h was electric for example.
In the last 20 years batteries and electronics have improved a lot, so electric vehicles are interesting once again.
And I don't think Tesla can explain the Mitsubishi i-Miev or the Nissan Leaf, the BMW i3, or the Renault Fluence just to give a few examples. Sure these cars were not designed to take over the world, but eventually electric vehicles were going to become more and more common in my humble opinion.
EU truck manufacturers like Volvo, Renault, MAN, and Daimler are all a year away from responding to market's demands. US manufacturers are behind a few years for a chance to respond to that initial demand.
> I think it would have happened anyway.
You could say that about literally anything. Space travel would have happened anyway. The internet would have happened anyway.
The conditions of history are a prerequisite for any major breakthrough. The advancement in rocket technology made space travel possible, but that doesn't make Neil Armstrong's achievements meaningless. He was not passively riding along some wave of inevitability, he was a pioneer that actively pushed humanity further into the future.
I didn't say it they would have never happened, I'm just observing that due to the competition (Tesla in this case, vaporware or not), the plans for EV trucks certainly seems to be accelerating.
A former Tesla board member said about ZEV credits: "Tesla is eating the competitors' lunch and having them pay for it, that's a pretty cool trick" [2]
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-02/honda-joi...
About 180 miles. Useful for some things I suppose.
Wonder what the cost will be for a battery that can haul a 44 tonne truck for 180 miles.
My point being: Its easy to announce that EV trucks are on the way next year, its much harder to make them economically feasible and manufacture them in large quantities.
If major city centres start enforcing tighter congestion/pollution bans, such that last mile delivery of goods to city centres can only be achieved with zero emission vehicles, then suddenly logistics businesses are forced to integrate EV or hydrogen into their fleets.
I honestly don't think this is that unlikely in many European cities in the next decade.
Older Diesel cars also are banned from quite a few city centers, but I don’t know whether that extends to large trucks.
My wife drove rural postal delivery for years. The longest routes would be 150 miles, most of the routes were less than 50 miles. This was rural, low density delivery areas. In cities and suburban areas, routes are even smaller, more like 10-20 miles round trip.
A contractor might have a job site 20 miles from home and make 3 trips to various suppliers during the day.
Seems like that's the sort of service these trucks are targeting and they will have plenty of range for that. Longer haul routes would require a different type of vehicle, but most companies that do both long and short haul have dedicated long haul vehicles regardless.
> Wonder what the cost will be for a battery that can haul a 44 tonne truck for 180 miles.
Big trucks are expensive to maintain. While the initial expense might be higher, ongoing maintenance is much lower and reliability higher. Not having to deal with vehicle downtime is a big issue when that vehicle brings your profits in.
It also alleviates traffic during the day by removing those trucks.
It would be easy for governments to subsidize parts of this for the good of society.
I can't promise that's how Volvo is rating theirs, but A) their customers aren't stupid, and B) the aerodynamics of a truck can mean it gets better mileage around town anyway. Not so much with diesel because of idling and shifting and things, but an EV with regenerative braking is an entirely different animal.
That's in pretty big contrast to internal combustion where it takes more significantly more fuel to go the same distance if you go too slow.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
As someone else mentioned, if they are quieter than the diesel equivalent, you may be able to start delivering to supermarkets in areas where they have curfews on deliveries after a certain time because of the noise.
Yes, it will cost some money for companies to bring infrastructure online, but they will be eliminating a lot of ongoing expenses as well. There are a lot of expenses associated with driving ICE vehicles which people just ignore when they bring up the expenses associated with EVs.
Companies are generally happy to expand their operations to allow their customers to buy more of their product.
You may not be intentionally trying to be negative, but you're parroting the same FUD lines used against EVs for decades, and against horseless carriages a century ago. (And which, incidentally, became entrenched in Oregon and New Jersey in the form of laws prohibiting motorists from operating the dispensing infrastructure.)
I don't know about commercial vehicles but the British National Grid is adamant that there will not be any great difficulty in supplying electricity to charge electric cars.
See https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/5-m...
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2018/06/26/do-londoners-dre...
for hydrogen vehicles anyway...
seems like we're treading down on such path..
There is a case to be made that excess renewables can be used to attempt to generate "green hydrogen" which is then a "storage" of renewables that can also be used for vehicles. I think in practice, it's a much smaller scale than battery electric vehicles.
Tesla are literally building enormous factories around the world. Are other brands?
Reference for easier searching: Northvolt (new manufacturer) is working on a major factory with VW, CATL is building new factories, daimler is about to have a new factory come online, etc etc.
Furthermore, secondary use of EV packs (when they're down to maybe 60% of nameplate capacity, they're replaced and the old ones are sold into stationary applications) means that there'll be _decreasing_ demand for purpose-built stationary batteries. Five years ago, if you wanted to put together a massive lithium backup system, you had to buy new batteries. Today, you can head over to batteryhookup and get BMW, BYD, Mercedes, and other ex-EV batteries for pennies on the dollar, in modules with the connectors on 'em and everything.
The industry is actively pursuing this, by the way. Five years from now, it'll either be much easier and more official, or wrapped up in-house and out of third-party reach. But either way, the path from EV to stationary use is developing, and the packs which already did some service on the road, will fill much of the need for stationary batteries, displacing that market's appetite for virgin batteries.
As the secondary market floods with ex-EV packs, at some point it becomes economical to "mine" the really-dead ones for their lithium, and the loop closes. Recycling plants aren't the same as virgin-lithium plants, but we'll see those developing in due time.
But as you say, batteries can be recycled into new batteries. At some point we'll approach some saturation point, where most of the need for those minerals can be satisfied by recycling old batteries. As opposed to fossil fuels which just go up the tailpipe, and thus need new resources to be extracted constantly.
However, there are major supply contracts being signed all the time. The major battery producers, Panasonic, CATL, LG, SK, Samsung SDI and even BYD. GM and LG have a major partnership and are building a factory in Ohio. SK is trying to build a factory in the US as well.
At the same time you have many new players coming onto the market. Tesla themselves are the most relevant. There are also major European projects, such as Northvolt (former Tesla guys from Giga Nevada) but also others like GigaVaasa. Northvolt will also build a large factory in Sweden, and a somewhat smaller one in Germany. CATL is building battery factories in Czech Republic and expanding existing factories.
There represent long term off-take agreements between car manufactures and cell providers.
Pretty much all of these have large contracts and are building factories all over the place.
All that said, nobody is as aggressive as Tesla with their targets. In fact, a good argument can be made that everybody else is copying the Tesla Gigafactory as a model. Even calling them Gigafactories and targeting the same sort of output levels.
In terms of car makers Tesla (and BYD) are the ones vertically integrating the battery.