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Comment by kd913 | Hacker News Reader

I'll just put it out here. If the UK alone meets it's plans for phasing out ICE engines for EV, it would consume 9 months supply of Lithium and 2 years worth of cobalt/nickel.

Add on the plans for the rest of the EU countries, US states, Singapore, and Canada and frankly Toyota has a point.

Significant chunks of that nickel comes from Russia hence the price rising 500% since the war began.

There is a complete mismatch in the scaling of electrified 'smart' products and raw materials going forward.

There needs to be multiple horses in play, along with a fundamental realization that the pipedream of a house in a suburb with 2 EV cars for every individual isn't a sustainable plan.

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> a fundamental realization that the pipedream of a house in a suburb with 2 EV cars for every individual isn't a sustainable plan.

Nor is a house in the suburbs with 2 ICE cars sustainable. Yet I haven't seen any conversation since the recent petroleum price increase about investing in better mass transit in suburbs in the US. That would make it much easier to stretch the natural resources like Lithium (think electric buses)

We appear to be trapped not only in car dependent infrastructure but also the car dependent mindset.

Mass transit, like higher density living, requires a stronger, more homogeneous, polite and less individualistic culture than the US has. A major driver of the growth of the suburbs was the abandonment of the cities and immediate neighborhoods around them, mainly by catholic ethnics as their neighborhoods were de-homogenized. (Catholicism has always been more urban-friendly than the native US protestant culture.)

At root it boils down to social trust, which has been and will continue to keep falling in the US and elsewhere in the west. Despite my preferences, I expect remote work to take the place of high density living: it's just more compatible with the highly individualistic ethos we have.

> Mass transit, like higher density living, requires a stronger, more homogeneous, polite and less individualistic culture than the US has.

A society doesn't have to be Singapore or Beijing to have viable alternatives to cars for moving the population around.

I've been in few places that are more diverse, rude, and individualistic than New York City, London, and Paris yet they all have excellent (by American standards) mass transit systems. The Bay Area, a more "polite" region, has arguably worse transit.

Furthermore, the most homogeneous and polite parts of the United States have the worst mass transit.

I suspect it has more to do with historical suburban planning decisions (redlining, mass transit unfriendly zoning) designed to enforce homogeneity than it has to do with broad cultural generalizations.

All those major cities developed their mass transit systems long ago in far different environments than they exist in them today. If you don't have strong cultural norms (and in NY, anyway, you do have a sort of lowest-common-denominator norm: you don't talk to strangers on the subway) you end up with people abandoning public transit.

Zoning is and was certainly an issue, but without stronger social consensus you are going to have a hard time getting folks back into a shared space.

I prefer denser living and would love to see it, but I view both sides of the political spectrum as sharing blame for the problem, and neither one willing to compromise on, or, frankly, even discuss it. So, unfortunately, I expect remote work to address the energy crisis rather than a return to sensible urbanism.

> All those major cities developed their mass transit systems long ago in far different environments than they exist in them today.

NYC, London and Paris have been pretty impolite places for a long time - far more impolite when they built their transit systems. For example, many 19th century London buildings were built with urine deflectors [1], reflecting the general civility of the time.

The Victorian era during which the early London public transit system was built was one of the most famous eras of high crime, giving rise to stories like Sherlock Holmes. The the Victorian era also saw mass exiles of criminals and other undesired people to Australia.

The difference isn't in the culture of those places at the time that their transit systems were built, but rather that they were built before mass personal car ownership was a thing.

I don't doubt that the shift to remote work for many people will change the transportation landscape a bit. However, a huge number of people will still have to physically get to a workplace, and highway congestion in major cities is nearly as bad now as it was before the pandemic, so the problem really hasn't been solved in any way by remote work.

1. https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/19th-century-urin...

Lithium-Iron-Phosphate chemistries appear likely to be the choice for less flashy vehicles, and don't require cobalt or nickel. It's slightly less energy dense, though has some other benefits.

Lithium mining can be increased, though perhaps not at current price points (unsure about this).

I'll agree that 2 EVs per suburb house is a bit absurd, but it was absurd before EVs too.

Lithium mining can be increased quite easily and is absurdly profitable at current prices which are about an order of magnitude above where it was 3 years ago.

The problem is time, it takes about 5 years to bring up a mine or a processing plant. Then the worry is that everybody will do it, crashing the market due to over supply.

There are a bunch of mines halfway through this process, but even when they come online in 2025 or so, they're not enough to meet demand. So any crash in Lithium prices is unlikely to come before 2028. But would you invest in a new mine to come online in 2028?

In 1894 The Times said "In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure". What they missed in their prediction was how cars would replace horses.

If lithium really does become such a scarce resource we can change laws if we have to. Or maybe we’ll just get better at recycling and mining it.

Only 5% of lithium has ever been recycled. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220105-lithium-batterie...

The places where they are mined in Chille, Australia, China. There is only 1 mine AFAIK in the US and there are huge issues due to large water scarcity and environmental concerns.

Nevermind the issues regarding the other components like Cobalt, Nickel which are the specific constrains here.

The reality is that the world is in no position to scale the production of such materials to meet the demands for every EV manufacturer, home battery production, consumer electronics, industrial and steel production all expecting 200+% growth simultaneously.

Lithium is all over. There just hasn't been demand for it.

This is a modest project, but neatly illustrates where we find ourselves:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rio-tinto-plc-lithium/rio...

For EV's to be commercially viable in the long term, we have to move solid state batteries. From everything I've heard they seem to be much more energy dense and don't require rare earth metals to produce. They would also increase the range on EV's to the point where "range anxiety" is just not a thing anymore.

IMO we're at the "2nd generation" of EV's, in the first gen, they were just toys, in this gen they start to make sense for certain people, by the "3rd generation" I expect solid state batteries to make EV's viable for the majority of people.

This is why I'm a big proponent of E-bikes, for most commutes they are a really good fit. However the USA is tricky, Telsa took cars electric, hat tip to musk, but it's not like he tackled the more complex part of over consumption. Look at the cyber truck!

As for raw inputs, Australia is building and will supply a lot of capacity in this space, the Russian impact won't be forever.

> Look at the cyber truck!

Wouldn't want to do any R&D that replaces laborer vehicles/work trucks eventually?

It's even worse because some people are relying on batteries being used for storage to compensate for the volatility of renewables.

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