"Not only the lithium may not be enough, but the concentration of the mining of lithium may create other geopolitical issues"
You mean vs fossil fuels? ... Lithium is available about everywhere
Legacy auto CEO want to gain time since time running their existing fossil car factories is money to their shareholders but well at some point we have to stop all this which does not help climate change ...
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".
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.
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.
Applies in all sorts of situations.
They seem to have no issue about saying this to employees lately…
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.
(I'm a PHEV proponent myself)
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.
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.
You've seen that I'm already convinced that Peugeot (and Stellantis in general) is not going to be a good EV choice, but... the figures seem to show that they don't compare unfavorably to Tesla on the criterion you chose.
The idea that he has an incentive to provide real good information is crazy.
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.
"Wow, if we use more lithium, we'll need to produce more lithium! This is such an insightful comment and not at all tautological..."
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!
Definitely a lot less of a gap, but still a huge increase in the entire supply chain needed, very quickly.
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.
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.
- 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-effectiv...
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-...
Battery and lithium breakthrough articles are a dime a dozen
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.
(It can come from electrolysis, but in practice doesn't)
...and nuclear submarines are just IP69 steam locomotives :)
Yeah this thread went off the rails lol. Oops.
The hydrogen used to fuel an FCV has to come from somewhere, and hydrogen is generally produced from hydrocarbons using the catalytic steam-hydrocarbon process. This typically uses fossil fuels like natural gas or methane as an input, and produces CO2 as a byproduct alongside the H2.
Compare with BEVs, where the energy used to power the motors can come from clean solar, wind, nuclear, or geothermal generation, without creating (as much) CO2 byproduct. (Yes, there are CO2 byproducts of producing power plants, but the goal is to minimize excess CO2 production, not eliminate it entirely.)
No. We're focused on whether or not hydrogen FCEVs are electric vehicles, which they are.
> Compare with BEVs, where the energy used to power the motors can come from clean solar, wind, nuclear, or geothermal generation
It can also come from coal and diesel and natural gas. None of this is relevant to whether or not FCEVs are electric vehicles.
The root of this thread was about geopolitical issues, mining, and fossil fuels. It got sidetracked into a puerile squabble about what mechanism makes the wheels turn.
But you've made some progress so that's good.
So when people in the real world say 'electric' they are of course referring to BEV because those are getting sold in the millions and you see them every day, while hydrogen electric is a basically a fantasy thing that 99.9% of people have never even seen.
So the smart as response of 'hydrogen vehicles are electric' is a typical "your not wrong but nobody will want to talk to you at parties" response.
Yes, it is.
> while hydrogen electric is a basically a fantasy thing
No, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are practical realities.
Planes: https://labusinessjournal.com/transportation/aviation/univer...
Trains: https://newatlas.com/transport/china-hydrogen-supercapacitor...
Automobiles: https://www.greencarcongress.com/2023/02/20230219-solaris.ht...
You are clearly arguing in bad faith. Bye.
You're emotional. Take a rest.
You're reasoning is the same as all of the wildly short-sighted rhetoric of any burgeoning field. Something that mirrors nearly all green energy developments, including wind, solar, electric cars, etc.
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.
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.
Very close, since it is inside.
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.
As opposed to fossil-fuel global warming that threatens to destroy their ecosystems as well?
Just proactively enact aggressive environmental laws that force Lithium extraction to be environmentally sound.
This is just catastrophism. Three years ago we were all going to die in two weeks or something, this is the same type of discourse.
As for the ecological damage, we can just come up with processes that don't require brine pools in the middle of deserts.
Just blows my mind.
Also this articles says literally nothing about how exactly the environment would be destroyed.