Tesla is partnered up with both Toyota and Mercedes to help them bring their EVs to market. Tesla may not be around ten years from now, but Tesla will almost certainly live on inside other car companies that
are benefiting from their pioneering.

There are two things John may be right about:
1. Tesla may fail
2. Axion may succeed in the Start/Stop market, and deliver positive returns for its investors.

However, his track record to date on even those two is appalling – Axion has been a terrible investment for as long as Petersen has been promoting it; while Tesla has just hit a huge home run (with more to come I suspect).

On most other topics John is provably wrong – he’s just either too incompetent to realize it, or too dishonest to acknowledge it. I suspect the latter.

BreathOnTheWind – great post. I am going to borrow the black knight metaphor at some point. I find it incredible that someone as fundamentally misinformed as Petersen has established such sway in the realm of EVs, and am delighted to see an increasing number of articles exposing him for the charlatan he is.

Unlike oil, all that lead, lithium, nickel, etc. does not get consumed as we drive down the road.  It’s recoverable/recyclable.

Let me copy over something on lithium in order to show you how wrong John is…

The 100 mile Nissan Leaf uses 4kg of lithium in its batteries.  Let’s say magic happens and between 2020 and 2040 we put 1.2 billion 200 mile range EVs on the world’s roads, each using 8kg of lithium in their batteries. (And that’s if range increase comes only from more batteries rather than the more likely improved anodes and cathodes.)

That would mean that in that 20 year period we would need to produce 480,000 metric tons of lithium per year.
And after that we could just recycle what we’ve already extracted.

At 20 mg lithium per kg of Earth’s crust, lithium is the 25th most abundant element. Nickel and lead have about the same abundance.

Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Portugal and Zimbabwe have roughly 13,000,000 metric tons of lithium that can be extracted. That’s a 27 year supply.

Bolivia has 5,400,000 tons. Over 11 years.

There are approximately 230,000,000,000 tons in seawater.    A 479,167 year supply.

The cost of extracting lithium from seawater is 5x or less than from lithium salts.  That would take the Leaf battery lithium price from ~$120 to ~$600 or less, or raise the cost of our 200 mile EV by not much more than $1k. 

—

Now, did you notice the statement – ” Nickel and lead have about the same abundance.”?

This is worth a look.http://tyler.blogware.com/lithium_shortage.pdfI don’t understand the vitriol in your comments.One of the strengths of his cynicism about point 2 is that he’s mostly right. Large parts of the EV industry believe there’s some kind of Moore’s Law at work but rather than computer hardware power doubling every two years we’re trusting in that battery performance is no longer governed by the rules of electrochemistry. There is both a theoretical and practical limit to the performance achievable from any given battery couple.How many years has it taken for GM to extend the Volt’s range by … three miles!Incidentally the author of the above is incorrect about talking about  GM inventing the term ‘range anxiety’ for the Volt. This was the term used when closing down Ford’s ECOSTAR program in the mid-1990s.

What Bob references is mentioned in the main article above as “article mills” under “The Audience” section.  It might be difficult to prove, but almost certainly is a factor in some investment articles on the web.  If you are curious about the SA underbelly, here is an article that suggests “influence” may be a motivation in submitting articles rather than income.

A goal for this article was to clarify the confusion John Petersen seems to encourage between what he is advocating for battery investors and the general poison he injects into the EV conversation.

In contrast John Petersen’s calculation is a measure not of kWh but of material invested in a battery.  His standard is the over simplification of: the average distance a US driver will travel in a day (12500 miles/yr /365 days )  Unlike Carter’s metric it is not tailored to the individual, the house (car) or the circumstances.  It is an average so at the very best it can only suggest what society might consider wasteful and it presumes to suggest that no one should use more materials for a battery than what the average person might use. 

According to this metric if you were taller or heavier than the “average” you should pay more for a plane ticket or be required to walk.  Perhaps if you used more electricity or water in your home your utilities should be turned off when you hit the “average.”  Or, shutter to think, if you made more money than the average person the government should take the balance.  And then which “average” should we use?  The US? or the World?  Obviously there is a problem with the standard he suggests.  His arguments sound well reasoned but they fail in their assumptions.

I may have offered comments on Seeking Alpha but generally pick up Petersen’s articles as a reprint on another site of possibly 40 to 50 that I may look each week at to absorb current technology.  So naturally I did not immediately think of SA as Seeking Alpha.  It was my error.  I might suggest you have a much closer connection with the site and it is therefore foremost in your mind.  It might be easy for you to assume it is the same with others.

Weaving an article together is not always a matter of going from one shocking discovery to another.  Often it is a matter of stating the obvious in a pattern that makes a picture of a puzzle.  Petersen’s disclosure is just that, a disclosure that appears at the ends of his articles.  He maintains it is not a conflict of interest and from the perspective of an investor he may be absolutely correct.  However it is clearly the history from which he writes.  Starting the article with the disclosure makes that perspective obvious for non investors.

I value your questions regardless of their present sincerity.  You represent an audience I also address.  When we try to shout down dissent (or bait the conversation) it may suggest we are not secure in our opinions.  It doesn’t make for a very good discussion.  I do sense some reaching in your questions and am more than willing to meet you 1/2 way, but that always requires if not a truly open mind then at least a willingness to listen.

Baiting and then receiving a hoped for intense response is not very progressive and probably not a good basis on which to judge a site.  We have much to discuss.  I hope you will stay in touch.        

That was meant to be more humorous or blunt than a tirade. But let me clarify those points.

I had already mentioned the fast charger, and slow charges at home are done overnight while you sleep.

You see charging costs as a problem. Anyone who would spend just 1 minute calculating the per km energy cost of an EV vs a petrol car would find that the EV wins hands down. You could and should have done that yourself before posting.

Subsidies are hardly a concern about EV’s, more about the budget deficit.

RTFM referred to the owner of the bricked Tesla Roadster that failed to read the manual and left it unplugged for two months. The manual clearly states that it is a big no-no (equivalent to never checking oil in a petrol car). So the fear of bricking is unfounded if you simply follow the simple guidelines and take proper care of your car (as you must do with any car, not just EV’s).

The problem is that your concerns don’t seem honest questions, but rather read like the standard laundry list of people that, for whatever reason, want to spread FUD about EV’s.

It comes down very hard on the side of facts.  Myths and distortions are treated poorly.

Enjoy your leave.

He made that ridiculous argument while having financial interests in a company developing utility, not EV, batteries. 

Clearly he understood that the battery market would bifurcate with lighter, higher capacity batteries developed for EVs while the utility market would put cost first.

I give John a score of zero for honesty.