"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".
The edge between manufacturers is always very, very thin in cases where manufacturers are actually trying to directly compete with each other. But usually they're not. Cadillac and Audi both build performance sedans but they build them for different demographics, taste profiles and usage patterns and it shows. Cadillac has tried to build cars for Audi customers and Audi has tried to build cars for Cadillac customers and they've both mostly flopped and they've gone back to their own things. The marginal new car buyer who flip flops between brands doesn't really care about that stuff. They have specific and varied criteria they're using to choose.
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.
After a decade in the auto industry, I can confidently say that the difference (in quality) between FCA and others is not marginal. There is a severe lack of sound engineering during development and process control in manufacturing. All OEMs screw up, but FCA just manages to do it consistently.
The Chrysler part of what became Stellantis was incredibly behind EV. Part of why Stellantis exists in the first place is because they knew they would simply die without having a partner for EV stuff. The European part of that new company had some EV stuff but they are not actually considered market leader by literally anybody and they are mostly in Europe.
It's the legacy supply chain that's causing this talk.
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.
CEO's don't care about employees, but they do care about their CEO buddies who own engine parts manufacturers, and supply chain companies that they are heavily invested in.
Carlos Tavares has been criticising the switch to electric for years, and regularly calls it in interview "that technology that has been forced on us". He's been spreading FUD on electric all over the French media for a while now.
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.
One could also say he's in a very informed position to criticise the (mandatory in EU) switch to EVs from. Who's more of an expert on the subject than the CEO of a major auto group that sells a good portion of both combustion and EV automobiles?
His group makes incredibly inefficient EVs. The Jeep Wrangler PHEV gets just 1.5 miles per kWh, compared 3.8 miles per kWh for the Tesla Model Y. Literally we'd need 2.5 times as much lithium to go all electric if we used his company's cars. The Wrangler PHEV is one of the few electric cars that is actually worse than an optimized gas-powered Prius in marginal emissions per electric mile driven (altho as we further decarbonize, this won't be true).
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 have my own beef with Mopar products, but it's unfair to point out the Wrangler PHEV as a showcase of how bad the Stellantis electric technology is. The Wrangler is a niche product that will never be efficient, not even if it used unicorn farts as its propulsion source.
Doubt it, that’d be better than any other car. I think they’re using a very optimistic testing cycle, like the European one. The EPA’s testing cycle is much more conservative and closer to real world usage.
Well we're not going to get an American test for cars that don't get sold in the US, but Tesla says the EU standards figures are 18 kWh/100 km for the model S and 20 kWh/100 km for model X. Nothing about model Y, maybe it's not sold here, but these numbers are much higher than Peugeot's, on the same test. It's not unexpected since the 308 is smaller and much more recent than Tesla's models.
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.
He is in a very informed position about the fact that his company is garbage and that it has no chance on actually competing if these mandates happen, therefore he spreads FUD to prevent them.
The idea that he has an incentive to provide real good information is crazy.
Lithium may be available everywhere, but it doesn't mean we're producing it in a consumable way.
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.
75kg?? Where are you getting that figure? Most common figure is around 160 grams of lithium metal per kWh (you can do better, as the theoretical minimum is half that, and some DO do better). Base Model 3 is around 60kWh (giving it about a 250 mile range), so just under 10kg per car, so even your 130kT/year gives us 13 million cars per year.
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!
Good thing the specific energy density of lithium is only critical in portable storage, grid level storage has lots of other options from alternative chemistries, compressed gasses, thermal storage, and even possibly hydrogen fuel cells.
Plus one of those shiny new pickup trucks probably uses 20 times the raw material that an electric scooter does. As usual "we don't have enough" for everyone to live like the US "so just accept the injustice while we have it all".
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.
You misread that. It's $5 of electricity. Nothing about the membrane, how long it lasts, any of the construction and maintenance costs, etc. And that's if that quote on the cost of electricity is remotely correct too.
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 seems that a typical battery might only need 5-75 kg Lithium.
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.
No its not. A technology that has existed since the 70s. Had major, major supports from government, specially Japan. And yet the largest car company in the world can't sell more then a few 1000s. Its embracing failure on every level.
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.
You literally don't have a argument against what I sad so you went to the lowest level form of argument, taking a part of what I wrote, then deliberately misinterpreted it away from its context.
The type of fuel cell car that existed in the 1970s were basically undrivable. The first actually usable hydrogen fuel cell car only existed in the last decade.
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.
That’s like saying a diesel-electric train is an electric vehicle because electric motors power the drive wheels. However, this conclusion ignores the fact the electricity is produced by combusting fossil fuel in an onboard generator.
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles do not combust the hydrogen. A fuel cell converts chemical energy to electricity. Batteries also convert chemical energy to electricity.
Remember that we're focused on mainly on climate impact here, not whether electricity is involved per se as an energy conduit or storage form.
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.
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.
I’ll stipulate that a FCV has an electric powertrain. But so what? An electric powertrain is orthogonal to the source of its fuel and its climate impact. That’s what matters to society. Let’s not ignore the forest for the trees here.
No. There is no step where heat is an intermediate step. If you relax the definition of combustion that much, even batteries are combusting inside them.
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.
It's 2023, yet here we are, still denying global climate change as if it's 2001 and making fun of Al Gore is trendy and edgy, because he lost the election.
Bear in mind that lithium can be extracted in much more environmentally friendly waves, where brine is extracted, filtered, and pumped back in [1]. I do have to wonder if such a process could ultimately be as efficient - and least invasive -- as an oil well.
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.
For some perspective: their CEO also complained that they're losing money on EVs.
And frankly, their EVs are not good. Their charging speed is half the speed of Hyundai's. Their efficiency is half of Tesla's. Batteries 40% smaller than an MG4 in the same price range.
I've driven e208 and DS3, and in both of these the projected range was dropping by nearly 2 miles for every 1 mile driven. I presume they display the range using the marketing number, because the actual one doesn't look good.
This company is releasing a FWD-only Jeep built on the same platform as Opel/Vauxhall Corsa-e econobox, without upgrading the drive train. Their website even confuses kW with kWh: https://www.jeep.co.uk/jeep-avenger/electric The car's spec sheet shows size of the touch screen, but not the size of the battery (but from the advertised range, it's 46kWh like the rest of them). They're really unprepared and far behind EV-first car makers.
I don't expect Stellantis to survive the transition to EVs, and their CEO probably doesn't either.
Yea, it's reminiscent of Toyota's complaints. Tesla, GM, Ford, Volkswagen, Hyundai/Kia, BMW, and Renault/Nissan have put some weight behind electric vehicles as their future.
Toyota, Honda, and Stellantis are the large auto companies that haven't invested in EVs as much - and finding themselves as the odd three out in an industry that increasingly sees EVs as its future as countries start putting timelines on how long they'll allow combustion-engine vehicles. Stellantis merged together the 8th and 10th largest auto companies to make the 5th largest and they're staring down a future they haven't invested in. Toyota has been lobbying to stall EVs having bet hard on hydrogen vehicles which have never really gotten off the ground (https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/07/toyota-bet-wrong-on-evs...).
It is possible that EVs won't be the future of the auto industry, but I wouldn't bet on that at this point. Most of the major players are moving to EVs and while the transition might seem slow to some people, it's looking somewhat inevitable. Toyota's investment in hydrogen cars hasn't paid off and their reluctance to pivot has put them behind. Stellantis seems to be in a similar position.
I don't know about Ford, since you mention them.
"First of all, batteries are the constraint here," Ford CEO Jim Farley told Yahoo Finance. "Both lithium and nickel are really the key constraining commodities. We normally get those from all over the world — South America, Africa, Indonesia. We want to localize that in North America, not just the mining but the processing of the materials."
Seems to me he's saying pretty much the same thing as Tavares. It's kinda strange, considering they're competitors.
I'm assuming Toyota and Honda are hedging more than the other companies because they have the luxury of doing so. They both have well-earned reputations for making the most reliable ICE vehicles on the road. Ford, GM, Nissan, and BMW have the opposite reputation. Maybe the don't see this generation of EVs as a worthwhile investment and/or feel they can catch up rapidly when the need is greater and not need to invest so much before that point.
Stellantis is in the odd group who is well-behind the EV curve and makes unreliable ICE vehicles.
Toyota could potentially become a leader in the space if their R&D in to solid state batteries pans out. The way I see it, EV's are currently in their "2nd generation". The 1st gen was the Tesla Roadster and a bunch of other proof of concepts. Now we are in the 2nd gen making cars with rather inefficient and heavy battery packs. In order for the world to electrify, we need to move to the "3rd generation" or EV's that will hopefully solve the issues around batteries.
> We have right now 1.3 billion cars (that are) internal combustion engine powered on the planet. We need to replace that with clean mobility.
If by "clean mobility" he means "more cars", then I'd ask: why?
These analyses are based on replacing all current ICE cars 1:1 with equivalent BEV. Why? Smaller personal vehicles, (electric) bicycles, public transport, better train infrastructure, car sharing are all alternatives to having the same number of cars on the roads.
> Our societies are losing a lot of great potential by not having a technology-neutral regulations.
hahahaha. "technology-neutral regulations"? As long as different technologies have different effects on the world, there is no such thing as "technology-neutral" regulation. You cannot say all cars are equal if your objective is to have clean air and less CO2 emissions.
> If by "clean mobility" he means "more cars", then I'd ask: why? These analyses are based on replacing all current ICE cars 1:1 with equivalent BEV. Why? Smaller personal vehicles, (electric) bicycles, public transport, better train infrastructure, car sharing are all alternatives to having the same number of cars on the roads.
I 100% agree with that but I see absolutely no push in that direction, if anything EVs are following the trend and are larger/heavier
The long term ecological goals are diametrically opposed to consumerism which is the driving force of the global economy for a long while now. We need people to buy shit, selling a bicycle instead of a 70k$ EV is bad in that regard
A carbon tax would be technologically neutral compared to the patchwork of mandates and such we have now. It would also be substantially more efficient.
Remember Peak Oil? It has been wrong during the whole industrial period, in which civilization has run on fossil fuels and worked relentlessly to extract more.
Now we have CEOs who know only the fossil fuel supply chain announcing Peak Lithium before civilization has even tried to extract and use it at scale.
This guy seems well-intentioned, but he doesn't seem to understand what civilizational change looks like.
Yes and at some point the sun will destroy earth. If Peak oil just means 'all resources are limited' then its an insight that an empty bottle of water could have made. It has no relevance for the real world.
Doomsday preachers would love your argument here. They've been wrong over and over, but doomsday is eventually coming! The sun will explode, heat death of the universe... sooner or later, something will spell doom for the human race. Doomsday isn't wrong, it's inevitable!
This is such a ridiculous argument, I don't even know where to begin.
I mean, do you imply that every thing that is bad which we can see coming is not going to happen because 'doomsday preachers would love it'? I hope you can see how absurd this is.
I think you're missing the point. It's not helpful to demand constant attention to a bad thing that is eventually coming if you are always extremely wrong about the timescale, and it is in fact much further off than you have said. The mere point that something bad will eventually happen is trivial and doesn't help civilization prioritize.
"X is technically still coming" protects the credibility of the end-of-X preacher, instead of engaging with the more important point that the end-of-X preacher has been hopelessly wrong to the point that it's no longer helpful to listen to them.
Lithium is abundant yes but it's a rare earth metal which doesn't mean it's actually rare but that the ore content is super low. Meaning practically speaking you have to move a whole lot of earth to get a little bit of lithium.
This makes a lot of extractions very difficult for ecological reasons.
Lithium brines have concentrations of well over 50 ppm. That sounds low, but given that many other minerals are economically viable when measured in ppb, 50 ppm is not low at all.
You're basically referring to noble metals and the like. We use them because they are useful in very small quantities. That's not the case with lithium.
I look forward to 10-15 years from now when lack of scalability is proven and comment sections will say exactly what you're saying here as if everyone knew it all along.
Its so fucking funny when I hear this argument. In the country where I live public transport gives you actual freedom. Like the freedom to go out have a drink and go home even late at night without having a high chance of killing myself or others.
The reality is cars are an incredibly drag on personal finances and a huge driver of personal debt, and relaying on walking, biking and public transit would give these people a much higher chance of escaping from poverty.
The idea that you can't have good transport without cars in sububran environments is just idiotic. Like maybe if you are talking about endless soulless American style sprawl but even then its just difficult not impossible.
Connecting rural communities by trains and buses is also mostly possible. People might still need a small car, but having access to public transit is still a great thing that would help people.
> Forcing everyone to use fixed transport locks their job prospects and keeps them dependent on corporations and government entities.
1. "Fixed transport" can be faster and more convenient to get to places than Individual transport. Subways in Vienna go on a 2-minute cadence and you can reach the entire city quickly and conveniently. Compare that to the hellscape that is "individual travel" in LA, where you're always going to be stuck in traffic and not getting anywhere fast. It's isolating to the point where people from different neighborhoods don't hang out with each other because the transport is so inefficient.
My tiny village of 800 people in the east of Austria has trains to both my countries and to two other countries' capitals every half hour.
Public transport doesn't need to be shitty. It's just held back by backwards thinking in the US.
2. Cars keep you even more dependent on corporations and government entities.
The roads you're driving on? Government.
The gas you're buying? Some of the biggest and most evil corporations in the world.
The car itself? Big corporations.
Even if it was true, it could have been alleviated by 1) expanding public transportation 2) electrifying it, or building electrical from the start. Subway, buses, regional trains, trams, and so on.
>> calling for a denser EV charging infrastructure that would reduce range anxiety
I hate that term "range anxiety". It suggests some kind of psychological issue with the driver when in fact there is a real issue with EVs with a small battery.
Stelamtis will save money being late to the party, but they may also have trouble securing volumes if they wait too long.
Also, the EV charging infrastructure is already pretty dense. If you have the ability to plug a space heater in, you should be able to trickle charge fast enough for a daily commute.
The main issue is that the EV charging stations all have bullshit social networks attached to them, and therefore do not reliably accept credit card payments.
>> The main issue is that the EV charging stations all have bullshit social networks attached to them, and therefore do not reliably accept credit card payments.
This I totally agree with. Most EV charging stations are owned by middlemen running networks. The end game will be level 3 chargers at every highway rest stop and McDonalds, where they will simply take cash or credit card payment and charge while you eat and use the restroom.
“We’re dead last to the ev game, and mostly make shit vehicles whose main selling point is aggressive marketing and easy financing. Let’s talk about why it’s impossible to succeed to try to distract folks from all the other companies that are actually succeeding.” -their CEO, probably
> The CEO of the maker of Jeep SUVs, Ram pickup trucks and other vehicles says he's not sure there will be enough raw materials to replace the existing fleet of fossil fuel-powered vehicles with all-electric vehicles.
1. I don't trust a word someone like that says.
2. There are many alternatives to Lithium batteries:
3. Why would humanity want to _replace_ all those fossil-fueled-powered vehicles? Just get rid of most of them. Combination of mass transit + taxis/cabs (*) + bicycles + walking instead.
---
(*) - Like the personal cars people have now, but not parked somewhere 90% of the time but rather ferrying people around all day. So not many necessary, especially with mass transit.
... but we shouldn't be trying to replace every single ICV with an EV? That seems like a silly goal. We have too many cars. EV's are a stop-gap, a cushion, a buffer.
The real goal are livable, productive areas with good public infrastructure that aren't designed around cars. All the infrastructure to support cars is a big part of the problem: concrete! Storm sewer systems! Traffic control! Highways cutting off migratory paths of native fauna! And the side effects of designing cities around cars: noise, auto collisions, pedestrian fatalities!
Actually, next generation concrete is one of the more promising carbon sinks.
Also, trains also have most of the issues you mentioned, and they have accessibility issues that cars solve.
We should be working toward minimizing total ecological impact, and simultaneously maximizing the number of workers our cities can accommodate each day. That means more cars, more bike lanes, high density housing near offices, higher throughput public transportation, and more telecommuting.
All of those are equally important. In most parts of the US, cars are extremely overfunded compared to the other stuff in that list.
Concrete currently is the literal opposite of a carbon sink and this will not change anytime soon.
Trains either don't have any of the issues or have them at an incredibly low level. So low that comparing it to car infrastructure its utterly ridiculous to even discuss them.
> That means more cars,
That makes literally 0 sense. Like actually 0. Cars are the single most inefficient way of transport both in terms of space and energy.
Literally anytime you have access to cars you could use the same space for MUCH MUCH more access for buses, metros, trains, bikes or literally anything else.
> high density housing near offices
Yeah and where are all those cars gone be parked? I guess its either in parking lots, making it low density. Or you have to build hugely expensive underground parking garages. And if you go underground, that money would be better invested in something else.
Future mobility concepts, will most likely result in fully autonmous shared vehicles for urban transportation or the last mile.
E.g. I usually use my car for about 40 minutes every day commuting between home and work. That's 1/35th of 24h and 1/15th of a 10h eindow. Considering that it would need time to pick up someone else, I'd estimate that one car could serve around 25 clients. Also getting from A to be should be quicker because of 15x less traffic on the road, and AI's (hopefully) not driving like idiots.
People will need to get used to not owning their own vehicle.
There aren't enough raw materials to 1st world lifestyle the whole globe in any capacity.
Serious adjustments will need to be made, or we need major technological breakthroughs. It isn't just a question of fossil fuels lasting forever or there being enough lithium. Almost every resource is under pressure. Drinkable water, fertilizer, copper. Good luck everyone. And no need to explain the economics ideas about how price spurs investment and so on, I know.
Both fertilizer and drinkable water can be synthesized from sea water. Our only problem as a species is that we can’t produce enough power cleanly. Fingers crossed for fusion.
Fission literally already provides practically unlimited energy and we discovered all the needed science and most of the needed technology in the 1960s.
Ok please tell why its so much better rather then being patronizing asshole.
Lets start with some really basic economics, the most important being capital cost, fuel cost and operating cost.
In terms of capital cost, a fission reactor is a far, far simpler device. Its so much simpler that its not even a comparison worth making. Fission reactors can often run for many decades without major maintenance on any of the core structures. Unless the vision of really tiny fusion reactors comes to pass, i.e. not anytime soon, this is a clear win for fission.
Fuel cost is also no comparison. Fusion will require complex fuel breeding, often requiring the fusion reactor itself to breed fuel. With Fission uranium and especially thorium are almost free, thorium being a waste product of rare earth mining.
Operation cost, on that we have no idea what fission will be like in practice. Seem to me containing a little Sun inside a box will lead to much higher maintenance requirements. In fusion the there is a plasma that can escape, even at far lower radioactivity. I rather life next to most GenIV fission designs.
If you want to build interstellar spaceships, yes fusion is your fiend. If you want to make cheap power on earth fission will always beat fusion unless its for some dumb political reasons.
Sea water processing has elastic power demands. If we power the grid off renewables, then we’ll barely have enough electricity on calm winter weeks.
That implies we’ll have more energy than we can use in the summer or on windy days.
Fusion or fission are useful for meeting inelastic demand when there isn’t enough production capacity. We need those too, but not for sea water processing.
What we are actually limited by is the political system of many countries. But going back to the original discussion, its not copper, water, fertilizer or lithium, or oil.
This company leader is announcing his company is failing in the market and has some huge supply chain issues with no resolution in sight. Just reading between the lines here. There are two explanations for this announcement:
1) he genuinely believes this. I don't believe he's that naive/uninformed/ignorant. But I can't exclude the possibility.
2) more likely: he's managing expectations for shareholders in a market where other manufacturers are growing at the cost of companies like Stellantis that have a big urgent problem in the form of an expensive legacy production capacity. Which while still profitable is heading for a cliff around 2030-2035 time frame latest but probably a lot sooner in most of their markets.
In other words, this is a CEO that is preparing for what is about to be an extended period of regular bad news in the form of unavoidable layoff rounds, plant closures, disappointing quarters, etc. combined with a lot of capital investment that is necessary to stay relevant. All while other companies are breaking records in production volume, profit margins, market expansion, etc. And it's not just Tesla that does that.
Stellantis still makes many billions per year of course but if they fail to invest that properly (as opposed to letting share holders get their dividend), they will start having some issues there pretty soon. I don't think they have until 2035 to figure this out. Doing all that while keeping share holders from rebelling is going to be a key challenge.
> 1) he genuinely believes this. I don't believe he's that naive/uninformed/ignorant. But I can't exclude the possibility.
The entire story is (literally) openly-admitted propaganda from Stellantis.
From the article:
> The comments from Tavares came during the Freedom of Mobility Forum, a platform the automaker created alongside its decision to leave the European Automobile Manufacturers Association and to change its approach to public affairs and lobbying. ... The hope through the forum is that the debate from views around the world will help to inform and influence public opinion to which lawmakers ultimately are subject.
It links to another article[0] which is even more explicit:
> the automaker is emphasizing "public affairs" over "pushing an agenda."
> "We came to the conclusion that ... it's better to talk to the people, and if the people change their mind, political leaders will align with the people."
I'm no PR genius, but it's not hard to figure out what agenda Stellantis is pushing with this new "not pushing an agenda" agenda...
This is FUD bullshit from a company that will probably be extinct in a decade because they dragged their feet on EVs.
Here's the current economic reality of batteries and EVs:
LFP at 200 wh/kg is in mass produciton now, and 230 wh/kg is on the roadmap in 1-2 years. That is a 400 mile range car (because LFP has superior pack density) with no cobalt/nickel.
Sodium Ion at 150 wh/kg is in mass production now, and 180-200 is on the roadmap. THAT is a 300+ mile range car with NO LITHIUM. Expected bill of materials will be $40/kilowatt-hour (not sure if that is cell or pack) once they get production really scaled.
These achievements are the true revolution in transportation electrification. And with Lithium-Sulfur and Sodium-Sulfur chems in the wings, it's likely that in ten years there is a battery with 2-3x the density with no cobalt, nickel, or lithium needed.
ICE drivetrains will be fundamentally economically noncompetitive. Too many parts, too much complexity. An electric car will be a motor or two and a sodium ion / sodium sulfur battery, and maybe half the cost of the stuff that actually moves the car. Quieter, smoother, faster accelerating, charge at home, etc.
Since the BMW CEO was canned over sqandering their electrification "lead", all CEOs have been on notice that you have a path to EVs ready or you get shitcanned by the board/investors.
All the CEOs from companies that didn't have any plans around this are playing defense. And at this point, the ship has left the port, and you either were on it or probably won't catch up and will either die in bankruptcy or acquired for peanuts.
This is because the main phase of EVs will be vertically integrated production like Tesla has. The OEM model of ICEs is probably a solid 20 years away, and the companies that don't have vertical integration plans in active development (you own battery plants to help guarantee supply in particular) are simply not going to survive until a new OEM model appears for EVs.
The OEM model, for those that don't know it, is that ICE car makers are largely component integrators from a large umbrella of parts producers. Many of these OEMs sell / partner with many manufacturers.
EVs won't be like that. The drivetrain doesn't have a rich array of dozens of OEM companies vying to produce components for your next platform/car. You have to design your own motor, battery pack, and directly invest in your own battery supply (the battery being the most expensive part) to get an economical battary pack for the EV.
If you don't have your own vertically integrated battery supply, the company won't have reliable supply (since EVERYONE will want batteries) and you won't get it at competitive cost.
Stellantis is an old auto-manufacturer that collected a ton of less-than-stellar car brands by reputation, probably drowning in their own bureaucracy and cruft.
Looking at all their current car offerings, most are overpriced and absolutely none are exciting/innovative. Unless you're a die-hard jeep enthusiast. Maybe.
This is a plain answer to justify the fact that their products are bad value at the current price, a company/leadership failure, nothing more.
Really? Who would have thought!?!
Mass electrification in the timescale set out by most governments is not really feasible. A mix of technologies including hydrogen, more efficient internal combustion engines and transition over a longer timescale might be more realistic.
Yes, there's not enough raw minerals for green tech. Watch any recent Peter Zeihan presentation, goes into some details as well, eg,
https://youtu.be/tJvpn98XsHQ
Not now, because there is little regulation. If we want to extract it in more environmentally responsible ways, we should enact laws that restrict the ecological impact.
All in all, Lithium extraction is better for the environment than oil or coal extraction (if you consider all the carbon in oil and coal are going into the atmosphere).
Yes, we need a 6 month moratorium on EV production until we understand the issues better.
Folks really don't understand (or probably, don't want to understand) the scale of existing fossil fuel infrastructure. In a works full of EVs, total mining will go down.
Not only are there not enough resources, our electric grid is nowhere near where it needs to be to remotely support a large shift to EVs. Any ideas that in 5-10 years we will only sell EVs is a grand delusion.
1. This article is specific to the UK, not the US.
2. The article is published by an Electrical company, obviously as PR piece to make it look like they have things under controll. This is not an idependaty study.
3. One the "solutions" to the problem the UK came up with is regulations which state:
>The regulations ensure charge points have smart functionality, allowing the charging of an electric vehicle when there is less demand on the grid, or when more renewable electricity is available. The regulations also ensure that charge points meet certain device-level requirements, enabling a minimum level of access, security and information for consumers.
In other words, even the grid the UK cannot handle an influx of EV's to combat this they are making the charge points "smart" (i.e. you won't be able to charge your vehicle when you wish only when the "smart" point says demand is low enough). This is hardly a solution. It attempts to "spread" out the charging with these "smart points", the problem is most people work during the day (and are parked somewhere where they cannot charge) and will want to charge at night. This would leave many SOL when they wake up to find their vehicle hasn't charged at all.
Hard, fucking, pass. Additionally, EV's are complete non-starter until they can go from 0% charge to full charge in 2 min or less IMO. If am on a road trip and trying to make good time I am not waiting around an hour+ for my vehicle to charge. Until charging is as easy and quick as pumping gas I have no interest in an EV.
EV’s draw less power on average than space heaters, and rapid charging is bad for the battery. These two facts address most concerns about grid overload.
On this road trip, you only stop for 2 minutes every 300-600 miles. Are you peeing in a bottle or something? Current cars take 20-40 minutes for 20-80%. That’s more than fast enough if you stop for meals.
Also, charging is more convenient than pumping gas, since 99% of the time, you do it at your destination (home, work, restaurant, grocery store, etc.)
when it said "our electric grid is nowhere near where it needs to be to remotely support a large shift to EVs"
without specifying further detail (like "we need more chargers connected to that grid"), the reasonable interpretation is that the grid itself, meaning the means of delivering power to power users (including any installed chargers), has deficiencies preventing it from doing so
"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 ...