https://asiatimes.com/2024/03/battery-price-war-in-china-means-cheaper-evs-everywhere/ Chinese manufacturers are already making cheaper lithium iron phosphate batteries along with lithium nickel manganese cobalt batteries. However, to really get costs down required innovation in the entire supply line from mine to finished battery pack. Other chemistries area also being researched and developed.
Gosh, imagine the pollution of this... The sad part is that while we get this kind of cheerleading in hopes of resurrecting the failing EV markets world wide, the smug factor has rubbed off, and even the super smug are choosing other options.
So much for those "American jobs" that they promised this "Green revolution" would create. As skeptics predicted, all the jobs will just go to China. And China is mostly a lower wage and lower income country, so these electric cars have only had limited appeal there. In fact it looks like the Chinese market for electric vehicles is already saturated. Bad news for Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers (posted in Environment & Conservation, Aug 19, 2023)
I doubt these Chinese battery factories are going to be powered by renewable energy. Electric vehicle battery factory will require so much energy it needs a coal plant to power it! (Environment & Conservation, Oct 1, 2023) Chinese factories are notorious for using electric power from coal fired power plants. And the coal used in China is even dirtier than that in the U.S. Coal accounted for 61 percent of China's electricity generation in 2022. (Though that's down from 81 percent in 2007) It was such an issue that China shut down all the factories around Beijing for 2 weeks during the 2008 Beijing Olympic games, because the air pollution was so bad and China didn't want to be embarrassed with all the tourists visiting from other parts of the world.
I like the idea of EV's. Unfortunately they aren't yet ready for prime time regardless of their price.
