I’ve spoken to half a dozen or so EV battery mineral experts in the past several months with one prime objective: understanding how much battery mineral supply can ramp up by 2030 and what that means for potential market share of electric vehicles in the overall auto market. Naturally, my top hope would be getting someone to tell me, “Oh, yeah, we could reach 100% EV market share in 2030.” Or even 70% or so. Unfortunately, that’s just not the reality of the battery supply chain according to everyone I’ve talked to.
This is not a problem of the Earth’s fundamental raw material supply, as I think every big fan of electric vehicles knows. However, the market’s capacity to actually extract and process EV battery minerals is a limiting factor for growth in this timeframe, and even Elon Musk has acknowledged this.
There is a bit of a critical assumption here that goes beyond the EV or battery market, though. EV market share will depend on how big the overall auto market is as well as how big the EV market is. Many EV market share forecasts for 2030 assume an overall auto market of about 100 million units. Naturally, while 50 million EVs would be 50% of a 100 million vehicle market, if demand for non-EVs collapsed (for some reason) and the overall auto market ended up being 50 million units in size, 50 million EVs would be 100% of the market. So, this broader question of what the market beyond EVs will be is critical for coming up with an EV market share forecast (i.e., guess).
BloombergNEF expects 26% plugin vehicle market share in 2030 in a market that doesn’t quite get to 100 million vehicles a year — hitting about 25 million plugin vehicle sales a year by then. (Recall that Tesla alone is targeting production of 20 million vehicles a year by then, and Volkswagen is aiming to produce about 5 million. Volvo plans to be 100% electric by then.) For much more on BloombergNEF’s perspective, listen to my interview with Logan Goldie-Scot, Head of Clean Power Research at BloombergNEF.
In a similar vein, in a recent interview with Josh Goldman, cofounder and CFO/CTO at KoBold Metals, Goldman told me that he saw 30–40% market share (of a 105–110 million vehicle a year market) as the upper limit, and sees 30% as a much more realistic but still ambitious expectation. That would be about 30–44 million plugin vehicles a year, and even the lower end will be very difficult to achieve from a base mineral perspective, according to Goldman.
Notably, both of those forecasts include plugin hybrids, which I’ll come back to in a moment.
Here’s a lithium company exec — Jonathan Evans, Director, CEO, & President of Lithium Americas Corp (which I own some shares of) — saying it’s going to be really hard for the industry to get to 30% EVs by 2030 and talking at length about the market (saying many of the same things the others said in…
Read More: 30–50% EV Market Share in 2030 = Upper Limit