This is a really helpful industry perspective, thanks csours. When GM and others are thinking about this, is it focused on beliefs in specific markets or globally? I know that many commodities trade globally but there is a ton of noise in DC about critical mineral supply chains and America's reliance on China but at the same time minimal movement on extraction and even less on processing domestically because of the environmental factors/NIMBYism. But if there were another trade war with China, would that change the equation for GM or are the rest of the markets a large enough weight that doesn't matter? Do you think GM and others believe there will be U.S. mines brought online or that all the growth in extraction will come from abroad? Given the pushback in other places (e.g. Serbia's Rio Tinto mine, Mexico nationalizing their sector, etc.) I'm pretty skeptical about being able to depend solely on foreign growth.

I believe government incentives and regulations will have a huge effect on the speed of adoption in a country, and China and Europe have both of those. I don't think mineral extraction will have much effect on locality. Shipping is pretty cheap - we already move oil to refineries and gasoline to filling stations.

GM does have a >> “strategic investment and commercial collaboration” with Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR) to procure lithium from Southern California’s Salton Sea

https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/gm-ctr-lithium-partnershi...

A while back I looked at raw materials for batteries. You can see the big push to get away from batteries that use cobalt. Because that is the one input that is actually supply limited. Everything else but lithium is tapping into an already huge production capacity.

>It is my understanding that these factors led GM's leadership team to stop producing the Volt (plug in hybrid) system and transition to all EV.

>If, however, battery prices stay high or go up for an extended period of time, this bet will look worse.

It's interesting to me that GM was really a pioneer in PHEVs with the Volt. They decided to transition their strategy at the same time as it seems like most other manufacturers debuted their first PHEVs. I have several friends that had Volts who went to other manufacturers because their use case still required a PHEV.

Was this purely to push buyers into the Bolt? This seems like an odd strategy since the Bolt, using LGs battery technology, is a transition technology itself for GM because it doesn't utilize the Ultium architecture.

How expensive would it have been to allow the Volt to solider on for a few more years with minor updates until an Ultium vehicle in a similar package with an extended range were available?

the Bolt is a much better car, I owned both and am on my second leased Bolt

What do you like better about the Bolt?

The thing I like the most about the bolt is that it isn’t a spacecar / tron-mobile.

It’s just a Chevy car … but electric.

As opposed to, for instance, Mercedes or Volvo - e-initiative i-mobiles that are chaotic dumping grounds for futuristic design concepts that nobody asked for.

We don’t want your "electric car" … we just want your car, electric.

This looks pretty much like your average Mercedes:

https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/vehicles/passenger-cars/eqc...

I was thinking of this:

https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/vehicles/passenger-cars/eqe...

... here's the interior console:

https://media.mercedes-benz.com/article/4faab79f-5c1c-4bcd-b...

Well, the S class is an ICE:

https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/vehicles/passenger-cars/s-c...

The bad news for you is that it's based on release date, not on ICE/EV.

Every car is slowly moving to just screens for controls/gauges.

Wait, are you the mrman ?

As in, Houston / 927 / defcon / teeletons friend ?

> It is important to remember that we are currently extracting megatons of fossil

Extracting oil doesn't leave the total devastation behind it as extracting cobalt does [1]. A several orders of magnitude increase in that sort of abomination that I linked to doesn't have anything to do with "saving the planet", it's all politics and money. There's also the whole "child labor" thing [2] but let's assume that countries like Congo will sort it out sometimes in the next 10-20 years, they most probably won't, but there's always hope.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2013-02...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/dec/16/a...

Desulphurisation is required to turn the extracted oil into something that can be used in a car. That process requires cobalt. So yeah the dirty cobalt business is directly supported by oil-based cars as well. However, I think catalyst use vs. battery use of cobalt is roughly 1:5 so your point remains valid (it's used more in batteries than in desulphurisation). Unfortunately I cannot find free statistics to support this 1:5 ratio which is from memory, maybe someone else can supply a link.

1:5 in what? I mean if it takes five times the cobalt to manufacture a kilogram of battery compared to a kilogram of gasoline, that sounds like a point in favour of EVs. You can only use that gasoline once after all, whereas the lithium could serve the full vehicle lifetime.

I'm not going to defend the damage mining like this does, but it seems unfair to say oil is any better [0]. In my opinion, oil causes much more damage and is harder to contain.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills

I agree about harder to contain, that's why that oil pipeline that was supposed to pass through the middle of an industrialised country was cancelled [1], that was a political move by definition, while cobalt mines and the like, because they mostly "happen" in the middle of Africa, are just seen as "doesn't really affect me -> it isn't really that important".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline#Phase_4_(can...

Today, one of the major uses of Cobalt is removing sulfur from gasoline. Somehow that never comes up in the "child labor!!" arguments against electric cars.

Wow, a pit mine. What an a-bom-i-na-tion!

https://www.google.com/maps/place/coalmining/@50.9809314,6.4...

Yes, pit-mines are abominations, as are coal pit-mines. I was comparing cobalt mining with oil extraction.

Of course the electric car is simpler, and batteries are getting cheaper. But the electric car with enough range for my use case is significantly more expensive in total still.

We have tax advantages for electric cars, very expensive fuels, very cheap electricity. Still the deal doesn't close yet.

The infrastructure is hopefully developing also, so they would get working chargers and working payment systems by the time the batteries have become cheap enough too. And charging systems that don't cost thousands per post for apartment building parking lots.

In a sense, the system is riddled with so many inefficiencies at every layer. The only way to do it properly is to have a vertically integrated company like Tesla. They have their own chargers and do a lot of their own components instead of using subcontractors. They don't use low quality charging services or apps or payment cards. The experience can be controlled only that way.

As opposed to oil, battery prices are highly influenced by China’s grip on the battery value chain at least until 2030.

Just as China will influence steel and aluminum prices through central planning, battery prices are unlikely to remain higher than current peak as long as the government continues its current stance on stable prices.

Can you explain this more?

On the grip on value chain, here’s a recent layperson explanation: https://www.npr.org/2022/02/21/1082172649/how-china-dominate...

Regardless of whether the mines are outside of China, the refinement/separation step of mined raw materials is done mostly in China (>80% global capacity). In addition to the 3-5 year lead time of building the capacity through new refineries, there’s a significant process optimization learning curve (non-transferable learnings) to move down the cost curve for new refinery entrants.

On central planning, this is well known that China manages raw material prices according to the 5-year plan: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-commodities-idUSKCN...

> If battery prices do come down, the cost of the extra battery pack will soon be lower than the added cost of the ICE propulsion system.

That definitively matter for some cars.

However, the relationship between humans and cars is not like it is between humans and most other products. The same car by features can easily be sold for twice the price, or even higher with minor added conveniences, improved quality, or brand. Add $5000 for a different color.

As long as an ICE is a feature people want to their car to have it won't matter that a battery is cheaper.

> As long as an ICE is a feature people want to their car to have it won't matter that a battery is cheaper.

The EU has voted a complete ban of the sale of new ICE and hybrid cars by 2035. It doesn't matter if ICE is a feature people want or not: it's not going to be an option.

The point was that price is not a relevant criterion. There may be others reasons.

The EU isn't the whole world. Also, the EU bans new dinosaur-burning cars from 2035. Cars with ICEs running on something else (synthetic) will most likely remain legal.

For ICEs to fully vanish from the market it would take a complete ban or some disruptive technology that works better for all use cases, to make them completely non-desirable for everyone.

Unless EU as whole ceases to exist thanks to passing laws that go against what people want :) Which is what I'm hoping for.

What people want in their car is very strongly influenced by marketing.

"There is a strong assumption that battery costs will come down"

On what bases? Typically bigger demand leads to price increase, do we have new sources of Lithium/Cobalt/Copper that would increase production significantly?