A current lithium-ion battery in the 50 kilowatt-hour class,...

A current lithium-ion battery in the 50 kilowatt-hour class, good for a range of around 250 to 300 kilometers, contains around 10 kilos of manganese, eleven kilos of cobalt, 32 kilos of nickel and a little more than 6 kilos of lithium. In future battery generations it will be possible to halve the content of the comparatively rare cobalt, but the nickel content will even increase somewhat. Always on board is more than a hundredweight of graphite, i.e. carbon in a crystalline structure, as well as a liquid electrolyte.