xkcd

Fwiw mining and manufacturing isn't as bad as some people want you to believe.

About 40% of lithium comes from brine extraction. There's a lot of lithium in the ground which are dissolved in brine - a super salty solution of minerals and water. They're extracted by allowing the water to evaporate into the atmosphere and then retrieving the minerals from that.

While that "wastes" a lot of water, none of that water was usable in the first place. It's too salty for humans and would kill any plants or fish if used for crops or dumped respectively.

Another 60% comes from normal hard rock mining. This is as environmentally friendly as most mining is.

A small portion - about 2% - comes from clay mining. This is actually rather bad for the environment and results in a lot of atmospheric pollution. Fortunately, it's a small shrinking portion of total mining.

The other main minerals in li-ions are cobalt, manganese, and lithium.

A large amount of cobalt comes from artisanal mining in the Congo. Artisanal is just a fancy term that means it's not work being performed by a company at a dedicated mine, but on a small scale such as a single person digging an area and collecting it or a handful of people who run their own mine. Unfortunately, though, we know that slave and child labor are used at a large portion of these mines.

Fortunately, there has been a large push to move to more sustainable mining practices. Some Congo miners have allowed outside observers to verify that all miners are adults working of their own volition.

Other countries such as Cuba and Indonesia have begun mining cobalt and are also following minimum employment practices. As a side benefit, these mines are also the main sources for nickel which reduces the number of mines we need.

Manganese is rather interesting. The current extraction process involves using natural gas to separate the components. However, there are nodules on the ocean floor which are rich in manganese. While these would produce less pollution to process, there are worries that removing the nodules would cause irreparable harm to the local environment.

However, even if your batteries were mined in the most harmful method possible and your power comes from the dirtiest plant of all time, the long term emissions are still much better than driving the most fuel-efficient ICE over the same time period.

I think of the mining issues somewhat like nuclear power. That mining is also very problematic and destructive to the environment. However in both cases, it’s a relatively small amount. Even if the local environmental or social cost is higher, it is such a small amount of material that the overall cost is still lower.

Also, consider supply and demand. Every article talking about how bad. The mining is, mentions how there’s reasons more developed countries don’t do it. Recent years have seen several announcements of newly discovered resource in the US, for example. Will they be mined, despite higher worker safety and environmental protection? One way to encourage this is higher demand, raising the price enough to drive their profitability

They're still working on this. I've more or less been holding my breath on the battery tech.

I want to see, either easily recycled materials that are common (sodium cells seem to fit here), or batteries that last the useful life of the vehicle and beyond (solid state batteries are a good example here). I don't really care which.

Cheap sodium based batteries, with adequate recycling technology would be a fine solution. Alternatively, even fairly "expensive" (in terms of rare metals) solid state batteries, would also be fine, since a single set of batteries may survive over several vehicles, depending on what solid state batteries can do when they finally hit the mass market.

I just don't want to have to replace the battery at nearly the cost of a whole ass new EV, well short of the useful life of the rest of the vehicle. Either the battery cost and environmental impact comes down, or we remove the need to replace the batteries with a version that lasts as long or longer than the rest of the vehicle.

I like EVs. I want an EV. I don't want to buy the current EVs on the market.

Also, if any vehicle designers are reading this, can we cut the shit where anything hybrid or EV looks ridiculous? IMO, a big reason why Tesla was so successful, is that they made it into a car. The model S, though unique in design, isn't a significant departure from pretty much every other sedan, in terms of design. Compare with something like the Prius, which is generally only a funny looking hatchback, or the Volt.... Which also looks pretty dumb IMO. Just give me a regular car.

... Okay, the Prius and Volt probably aren't the best examples. I'll put a better one here.... The BMW i3. Just.... What the hell.