Tesla’s Nemesis in China Is a Tiny $5k Electric Car from GM
Now, back to the merits of the article:<p>&gt; One of the biggest challenges in making EVs cheaper is the battery, which currently represents about one-quarter of a car’s cost because of the expensive metals used, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese.<p>No, it&#x27;s such a big, massive misconception the misconception that the echo chamber keeps repeating.<p>The raw material cost of metals used even in the biggest batteries around is at maximum $1k-$1.5k, and usually just few hundred bucks.<p>What makes it expensive is the big chem, and it&#x27;s stranglehold on processing them into cathode, and anode materials.<p>Plain graphite, while also being dominated by an oligopoly, still only costs $1 per kg, but the moment it becomes an industrial chemical, its price shoots n-fold.<p>Lithium is by far not the cost factor at all, with the amount used, and no scarcity prospect is in sight, despite speculations of the stock market lemmings, but the moment it is put into some chemical relevant to battery making, it too shoots up in price n-fold.<p>Cobalt was one of few things which really used to be pricey, but not much now. The cost was approaching $200 per kg at the top of the Cobalt bubble, but then it felt to $20, and below. And again, the moment it becomes a cathode material, it costs 10*n-times as much.<p>The cost advantage of LFP batteries which a lot of Chinese companies prefer to cobalt based ones is not much in the material cost, but because the chemical&#x27;s supply chain is much simpler, stable, and has much, much, more domestic competition.<p>The cobalt based cathode materials are still a domain of LG Chem, and few much smaller Japanese companies.