I wonder whether they’re using any of Ted Kravitz’s fan fiction in the script:

Yup - even LR do this with the Range Rover/Range Rover Sport.

Outlander *sport*, thank you very much.

Fellow weirdo here. It’s an awful smell.

Damn straight. It's nauseating. I don't understand the appeal at all. Just leave an open canister of gas in the back and you get about the same smell.

Thank god for that - it’s an awful smell.

The 215hp Alpine R5 EV, from the brains behind the A110 and every hot Clio and Megane should be a bit of fun.

True, lithium won’t solely be used for light-duty BEVs, but I suspect they’ll be the principal application - there are good/better battery options for most other applications (anything that doesn’t require very high energy per weight/volume), and other metals for non-battery applications.

I think that long-term, long-distance air travel will be the primary application for e-fuels, yeah - the sheer mass of batteries required pretty much rules them out of contention in that application in their current form. That, and buying special Ferrari- and Porsche-branded drums of fuel for your vintage 296 GTB or…

Lithium can be extracted from seawater, and the ocean contains about 180 billion tonnes of lithium (which is about 2000 times the current estimated land-based lithium resources), in a process that is profitable in its current form and which also hydrogen, chlorine, and brackish water that can be reasonably easily…

The 22 million tonne figure is reserves - that is the portion of resources that are deemed to be economically recoverable. I’m not sure what your basis for doubting that figure is, but I’ll take the word of the USGS on the matter.

Happily, I think that the reason it doesn’t get much press is mostly that it doesn't have the same environmental issues at brine extraction.

Absolutely agreed - there are a lot of options that don't require lithium when energy density isn’t such an important factor.

Most of the known lithium reserves are in Chile and Australia - both of which are strong partners with the U.S. (and from a realpolitik perspective, both of which would probably like to maintain those strong relationships).

Long-term, the expected production costs of e-fuels are expected to drop significantly from their current cost (roughly $200/gal), but the suggestion is that the cost may in the best case scenario get down to around $4/gal (production cost, compared to about $2.5o/gal for current fossil fuel derived gasoline). That…

Utility storage opens up the suite of potential chemistries a huge amount - vanadium-redox and zinc-bromine flow batteries make by far the most sense in those applications . They both have all of the characteristics you want in a stationary storage battery - essentially infinite cycle capacity, no self-discharge,…

Most lithium extraction is currently done in Australia, as it happens, and thankfully the deposits are in hard rock rather than brine, so the issues with brine extraction aren’t there. It’s fundamentally very similar to any other kind of hard-rock mining (dig a big hole and crush up the rocks that you get).

There are a couple of significant issues with hydrogen. The first is storage, and the second is power density of fuel cells (the reaction surface has to be massive to get decent amounts of power out of them).

Exactly - if people want lithium, there are miners who will be quite happy to supply it. McKinsey, that famous bastion of the greenie and the leftie, wrote last year that they believe the world will secure sufficient lithium resources to meet the demand of electric vehicles.

It really depends on the resource extraction process - lithium extracted from brines (as is common in South American deposits) is a fairly resource-intensive process with risks of environmental contamination. Lithium extracted from hard rock (as is common in Australian resources) is much the same as any hard-rock…