"There aren’t enough batteries to electrify all cars — focus on trucks and buses instead"
"Electric vehicles still produce air pollution and greenhouse gases from their brakes, tires, the electricity that powers them and the factories that build them. Even if we can address (or ignore) these problems, there is a much larger stumbling block facing personal electric vehicles as a solution for climate change.
In 2019, the world produced about 160 gigawatt hours (GWh) of lithium-ion batteries.
That’s enough for a little more than three million standard-range Tesla Model 3s — and only if we use those batteries for cars, and don’t build any smart-phones, laptops or grid storage facilities.
The battery production capacity currently under construction will allow the production of the equivalent of 40 million electric vehicles annually by 2028, according to one estimate. "
"That sounds like a lot until you see that the world produced nearly 100 million cars, vans, buses and trucks in 2019 alone. There are around 1.4 billion motor vehicles in the world today — a number that will almost certainly continue to increase if we don’t take major steps to shift transportation onto other modes.
Even at the projected 2028 level of battery production capacity, it would take us 35 years to replace this global vehicle fleet with electric models. That’s not nearly fast enough to avoid the worst consequences of climate change."
"Lithium-ion batteries should therefore go primarily to vehicles intended for long distances or large cargo loads. Garbage trucks, buses, pickup trucks used by skilled tradespeople to get to job sites and the van that delivers your Amazon purchases are all prime candidates for electrification.
That Nissan Leaf you’ve been eyeing, unfortunately is not. You can probably travel on a bicycle or a city bus much more easily than a truckload of power tools, parcels or municipal waste can. "
https://theconversation.com/there-arent-enough-batteries-to-electrify-all-cars-f...So rare earths won't get more common. That means that the buyers of those rare earths will compete one against the other for supply. That will force those prices up.
Of course in the brave new world of renewables anything is possible. Even smelting ores using unicorns.