Good News & Bad News, page-4185

Interesting comment from Mr Musk this morning:

Elon Musk told Tesla’s annual meeting this morning that the electric vehicle maker doesn’t envisage any lithium supply shortages.“Lithium is extremely plentiful. It’s one of the most plentiful things on earth, it’s not rare at all,” he said. “There’s lithium everywhere, so that’s not an issue. Also, lithium is maybe only one or two per cent of the [battery] cell.“So the actual thing that matters is the cathode. Our long range vehicles use a nickel-based cathode, some people think it’s a cobalt-based cathode, no, cobalt is used in phones and laptops, we use nickel because it’s higher energy density for our long range vehicles. But for standard range vehicles and our stationary storage, I think all of that will move to ion cathodes. Ion is also extremely plentiful, nickel is not rare, but there’s 10 to 100 times more ion than there’s nickel...I think the vast majority of batteries in the future will be ion-based, so I do not see any shortages.”