“The car industry’s multibillion-dollar bet on electric vehicles was built on a single premise: that batteries would carry on getting cheaper.
In 2019, Volkswagen executives even brandished charts predicting a steady decline in battery costs, as they laid out their ambition to consign the combustion engine to history.
For years the industry was proved right: battery costs fell from $1,000 per KWH for the first models more than a decade ago to about $130 in 2021…
But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatens to halt the slide. Prices of nickel, lithium and cobalt — key raw materials for battery manufacturing — were already rising because of global demand.
But with Russia accounting for 11% of the world’s nickel, and supply chains already stretched, the war has sent the cost of such commodities skyrocketing.
The price of these three metals required in a 60KWh battery, enough for a large family sport utility vehicle, has risen from $1,395 a year ago to more than $7,400 in early March…”