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The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

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Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#111

It seems like people often forget how applicable EVs are to in city heavy commercial vehicles such as garbage truck, buses, service vehicles The high torque nature and predicable nature (at least in the case of garbage trucks and buses) make them ideal candidates for EV. Arguably much more viable use case (at least initially) than household vehicles.

EVs are a clear winner for jobs like that. Has the prediction of EVs being low on maintenance bore out? If so, its further incentive for commercial and public use. Municipalities benefit greatly from predictable, constant expenses.

I know Leafs have had their service lives (at least for their batteries) revised up recently. Solid state is where it’s at.

Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#112
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong chart, it should be split by manufacturer.

Depends what you care about. If you're writing apps it shouldn't.

GP is talking about Tesla/Apple's business strategy, so clearly in this context a split by manufacturer is what they care about.

Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#113
post #67
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah we always do. Mining is incredibly cyclical boom/bust In Australia for this reason. Also it’s just as difficult to leave it in the ground. Any decent mining operation takes at minimum 2-3 from construction to production so you still need to take that into account (unless you lock down some offtake agreements to hedge the risk)

How financialized are mines, for want of a better term? i.e. Are people buying the mining company's shares assumed to be taking the gamble on what prices will be in 5 or 10 years, or do mining companied buy a ton of futures to try to even things out?

Both, depending on the company. The great companies are play heavily in the futures market, as a result their production is mostly locked up when the boom comes and so they don't make any extra money. The not so great companies sell to market mostly, and make a ton of profit in the boom years and are lucky if they don't go bankrupt in the bust years.

Of course great and not so great are by my definition of great. You can do should do your own investigation.

Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#114

There are other problems arising for electric cars: road tax. Electric cars are way havier than most cars and have so much traction that road maintenance will be much more expensive when everybody has an electric car. This is why countries like Norway and the Netherlands are thinking about raising the road tax for electric vehicles. I also think this is why brands like Toyota are still thinking about hydrogen cars. T…

This is hilariously misguided with little real truth to it. Are electric Cars heavier? Yes...but not really by much. Sure a Model S is heavy, but it is a full size car designed to compare with other 4000-pound range cars and a side effect of the platform's age meanwhile a Model 3 is less than 10% heavier than a BMW 3 series. The traction idea is just absurd. The real reason why Norway wants to raise the road tax is b…

Well maybe this is different in the US but in Europe electric cars are easily 20% heavier than similar models.

The traction idea is not absurd. Tesla owners claim the tires last around 25000 kilometers instead of 60000 when the drive 'insane' all the time.

Takeshi Uchiyamanda was always talking about the environment when he talked about hydrogen. And even now he sees that battey cars are taking off he still stand by his point.

But that is all marketing talk?

Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#115

The electric car industry hasn't remotely boomed. Electric cars are still deeply strangled by two key factors: industry inertia and the cost/supply of lithium batteries. Once those two factors are solved (and a build-up of lithium mines is key to that) electric cars will go from being a niche within a niche to utterly dominating the market very, very quickly. Within the next decade we might see companies like Hyundai…

People HATE the maintenance requirements of cars. If Tesla can establish their cars as almost never needing service with a usable life of something closer to 1 million miles and decades of use then suddenly paying a premium for their models can be spread over much greater periods of time.

Personally, I wish they would decouple the platform from the comfort center. Have chassis form factors for various purposes (single person/roadster, crossover, truck, utility, etc) and branded “comfort centers” housing the human interface stuff. Make it so the comfort center can be changed out when ever and keeping the same underlying platform.

Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#116
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? The role of the grid will still be arbitrage between power generation and power consumption. A flat in a high-rise in a city doesn't have anywhere to put solar panels; a factory couldn't possibly sustain its power consumption with on-site renewables, and no amount of on-site battery storage will change that. Somebody needs to buy power from net producers, and sell it to consumers.

A factory may put in batteries to prevent the cost of demand/surge power. An apartment depending of where it is may put in batteries if it is in a location where power sagging/failures happen often. Remember the entire world is not North America or Europe.

Yes, of course power sinks gain value from having their own power buffer, even if only to take advantage of fluctuations in energy cost. But why would this cause grid collapse? They still need the energy delivered, at some point. It puts whoever runs the grid in the quite enviable position of power market middleman. Far from collapsing, I would expect grids to do extremely well out of such a shift.

Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#117
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The electric car industry hasn't remotely boomed. Plug-in electric sales in 2018 were up 61% over 2017, which was 51% higher than 2016 (via quick wikipedia check). What numbers would you want to see before calling that a "boom"? How much higher than 60% growth does something have to have before it's not "strangled"? I think that's silly. Clearly these things are going somewhere. Production at all levels is adapting…

yesterday I had a dollar in my pocket, today I have 2 dollars. Dollars in my pocket is booming right now. But relative to amount of dollars I have or that in the world, not so much. So I think other statistics would be more useful to determine quality of boom.

The question is whether you'll have $3 in your pocket tomorrow and $4 the next day or $4 tomorrow and $8 the next.

Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#118

The electric car industry hasn't remotely boomed. Electric cars are still deeply strangled by two key factors: industry inertia and the cost/supply of lithium batteries. Once those two factors are solved (and a build-up of lithium mines is key to that) electric cars will go from being a niche within a niche to utterly dominating the market very, very quickly. Within the next decade we might see companies like Hyundai…

Uhhhhh I still have no idea where I get the power from? I don't think I will see a power plug in the next ten years near my house (street)

I'm pretty sure there's still 5 years worth of exponential growth potential from people who do have garages or otherwise will have the ability to pay for getting a plug somehow, and from new construction that's already set up for charging plugs (I believe it's required in some places like California now?)

Then what will happen in the 5-10 year time frame is that EVs will be significantly cheaper than ICE vehicles (maybe not purchase price at first, but certainly TCO).

Is there electricity anywhere near where you park? Think about what it would cost to set up a plug. It might be quite a bit, but unless electricity is really far away, it's not a crazy amount either.

If buying an EV would save you a significant amount of money over a 10 year period, it's likely that you'd be willing to use some of that savings to pay to have a plug set up. Maybe you can't set up that plug yourself, but as long as you're willing to pay a bit extra over the cost of electricity, there's going to be companies willing to set up plugs along the street. Once investors see that the transition to EVs is guaranteed, I'm certain there will be a rush to put up chargers, since the company that gets a street is likely to keep a monopoly on that street for a long time.

The other way to get street side charging is simply to get governments to do it. That's what Oslo has done. They started out being free, but now there's a reasonable fee on them, and I think that's much more sustainable. With some luck in the elections I could see something like that happening in several areas of the US. It'll be much easier to sell this policy once EVs are a bit cheaper, so I think it's possible if democrats gain some control, especially if they gain some support for some kind of Green New Deal. It's a great investment to boost the economy long term. Generates lots of decent work in the short term, and massive benefits to the public in the long term since it'll guarantee them cheap charging, leading to big savings to operate their vehicles.

There's another way to think about it: setting up a plug for your car is a very tiny fraction of the work/infrastructure required for your apartment, which somehow you found the way to pay for (either directly, or through renting). This kind of work is relatively easy to finance if the demand is there, since it's an investment that's likely to last a very long time and generate a lot of value.

There's also the fast charging model, which can be OK if you have a car with a fairly large battery and don't drive too much. You might be able to get by with charging once a week, and you could probably do it at a location where you'd spend some time anyway, such as a supermarket, near a restaurant or exercise studio. It causes some extra wear on the battery, but not an unreasonable amount.

Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#119
post #49
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You people are so obsessed over door handles. It's a hysteria. They're fine.

They're expensive

The Model 3 one? Doubt that they're significantly more expensive. They have some problem with frozen door handles which they should probably get some fix for, like putting in a heating element. That would add cost, but also not much.

Re: The Lithium Mine Buildup Is Outpacing the Electric-Car Boom

#120

The electric car industry hasn't remotely boomed. Electric cars are still deeply strangled by two key factors: industry inertia and the cost/supply of lithium batteries. Once those two factors are solved (and a build-up of lithium mines is key to that) electric cars will go from being a niche within a niche to utterly dominating the market very, very quickly. Within the next decade we might see companies like Hyundai…

> normal door handles The business plan always was to start at the high end with the Roadster, then the deluxe sedan and then the affordable Model 3. The Model 3 has cheaper door handles than the Model S. Tesla is about building car factories rather than cars. Once you have the robots doing as they are told then you can make whatever you want. If you had to recycle a Lamborghini and a Dacia Sandero then you would pro…

Taking about legacy brands, most of them do have exactly those low range fully electric models available that you're talking about, e.g. the VW e-up, which is a great choice for a daily commute.

They aren't very aggressive about growing the market though.

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