Just How Many EVs Can Be Made? Far Fewer Than Expected

Save the date: In large parts of the world, when you say “electric vehicle” you don’t mean a car or an SUV, but a scooter—a two-wheeler, as they are better known. And today’s greatest two-wheeler mania of all is perhaps in India, pioneered by Hero Electric, the country’s largest manufacturer of electric two-wheelers, and its managing director, Naveen Munjal. I’m excited to host Munjal for the next Live Chat With The Electric, May 3 at noon ET. Registration and more details to come. Email me to save your place: [email protected].

By now, we all know there is a critical shortage of battery metals—even President Joe Biden is talking about it. But what no one discusses is approximately how many EVs will or won’t be made as a result. This week, we do the calculations and lay out just how many batteries automakers can count on this decade, and how many EVs they can manufacture from them.

For well over a year, experts have been ringing the alarm bell over a coming shortage of electric vehicle batteries and the raw metals that make them work. Now, industry leaders say the shortage is here: Earlier this month, R.J. Scaringe, CEO of Rivian, which makes electric trucks, told reporters that the company will produce far fewer pickups than he wants because “90% to 95% of the [battery] supply chain does not exist.” And in a call last week with analysts, Tesla CEO Elon Musk called a shortfall in lithium production the “fundamental limiting factor” for the success of the EV industry.

But it has not been clear just how many EVs will be made. I’ll plumb that question here in a stroll through the world of battery metals mining and EV manufacturing. I’ll start with how many EVs automakers hope to sell in this decade. I’ll move on to a forecast of how much battery raw material will be mined and how many batteries will result, zeroing in on the most popular battery types. Finally, I’ll do the calculations and tell you how many EVs will result. To get there, I am relying on raw material projections provided to me by research firms Wood Mackenzie, Rystad Energy and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. And I am feeding that data into BatPaC, a tool developed at Argonne National Laboratory to calculate various aspects of lithium-ion batteries.

The industry’s plans for EVs are ambitious: BMW wants to sell around 200,000 pure EVs this year alone. By 2025 or 2026, General Motors estimates it will sell 1 million EVs a year, and Ford projects 2 million in annual sales. By the end of the decade, Toyota is counting on selling 3.5 million EVs a year, Volkswagen on 4.5 million and Tesla—typically swinging for the fences—on 20 million. When you add the expected sales from smaller manufacturers, you wind up at Western plans to sell more than 40 million EVs annually by 2030, about nine times the total produced globally last year.

But here’s the rub: Those company predictions are almost certain to be wildly off. That will force automakers to make a dramatic pivot, which will make the 2020s look very different from current industry assumptions.