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This source tells a different story: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...

IIUC 50% of the cost of a battery is coming from lithium

Manufacturing is only about bout 25%

That's not what the infograph tells you. It says that 50% of the battery cost comes from cathode materials, which is true for some chemistries, but even in those cases that's not because of lithium, but because of cobalt.

Which is precisely why the industry is moving to chemistries that don't use cobalt, pushing the materials price back down.

Also, lithium isn't the cathode, it's the anode. The cathode is primarily nickel (III) oxide, which is unstable and so stabilized with cobalt, aluminum and/or manganese.

Technically most Li ion batteries are created in the discharged state, with the lithium in the battery provided by the cathode at the time of construction, and then moved over to the LiC6 anode via charging.

Electric car production would have ground to a halt over the last 2 years in the face of a 15x increase in raw material costs if it accounted for 50% right? That doesn't seem to have happened.

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