“GM is now solids number two for EV market share, and our EV market share is now almost the same as our non EV market share right now, so we're really proud of that.”
The other key driver of cost for batteries - which make up around one third of the cost of a modern EV - is chemistry. Oury explained that, until now, EV batteries have been built with high percentages of the more expensive materials, like nickel and cobalt.“So you start looking for what's the next most affordable material, and it's manganese, so we're taking the manganese up to 60 or 70 per cent, take cobalt down to between zero and 2 per cent, and we're going to drop the nickel down to 30 or 40 per cent,” he explained.“The result is a called LMR - or Lithium Manganese Rich, and what we mean is it has more lithium and more manganese than you would typically find in an LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate) battery.
“This is not easy to do, but we've addressed it with how we manufacture te every element of the cell. And the LMR batteries we’ve got now have 33 per cent more energy density than the best LFP cells.”
