Consider This from NPR - With Gas Prices Still Soaring, Electric Cars Meet A Moment

Episode Date: June 9, 2022

There have never been more options for drivers who want an electric car. But the demand — fueled by high gas prices — is almost over-powering, and supply chain constraints aren't helping. NPR's Brittany Cronin reports on one of the biggest EV launches of the year: Ford's F-150 Lightning. NPR's Camila Domonoske explains why China dominates the market for electric car batteries. Also in this episode: General Motors President Mark Reuss, who spoke to NPR's Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition. Help NPR improve podcasts by completing a short, anonymous survey at npr.org/podcastsurvey. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, before we start the show, we have a favor to ask. NPR is doing an annual survey to get a better sense of how listeners like you spend time with podcasts. So if you have a few moments and want to help us do that, you can complete a short anonymous survey at npr.org slash podcast survey, all one word. Your input would go a long way and we would just really appreciate it. So again, that's npr.org slash podcast survey. That link is in our episode notes.

And thank you so much. All right. We've been hearing about it for years. Electric vehicles are the future. Well, that future might be here. The all-new, all-electric Volkswagen ID.4. The fully electric Hyundai Ioniq 5. The fully electric Kia EV6.

There are almost too many to keep up with. The first ever all-electric Chevy Silverado. Just years ago, Tesla was the only game in town. Ford's first all-electric SUV is a Mustang. But now, there are more and more new cars hitting the road. BMW iX is electricity in its ultimate form. And pretty much every automaker is staking their future on the switch to electric. Be among the first to own the revolutionary Hummer EV.

So yeah, power is flowing to the new electric vehicle market. But it's a market that's not yet fully charged. For starters, America needs a lot more charging stations. And while electric cars are cheaper to own over a vehicle's lifetime, the average cost can be thousands of more dollars up front. And then, of course, there is the shift in mindset that consumers will have to make when they go from filling up to charging up. But I think most people still haven't driven an electric vehicle. And when you drive one, you realize the convenience and you realize the ability to charge at home.

Mark Royce is the president of General Motors, which is charting a path to what the company calls an all-electric future. There's a Chevy Bolt, Silverado, Cadillac Lyric, and they announced this spring that an all-electric Corvette is on the way. To charge all those cars, Royce told NPR that GM is working with thousands of dealerships all around the country to install new charging stations. We're driving the technology to be able to charge in that same amount of time that you fill the gas tank. And with gas averaging around $5 a gallon. The adoption rate, you know, things like the higher gas prices today is only going to be an accelerant for that, I believe. Consider this. There have never been more options for people looking to go electric, and automakers

are staking their futures on that shift. But there are still a lot of questions about what that future will look like and whether the global supply chain is ready. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Thursday, June 9th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Now, of all the electric vehicle launches this year, one of the biggest comes from Ford, the F-150 pickup truck. It's been

America's top selling vehicle for 40 years. It's the number one selling vehicle in the country just across the board. It's also the number one selling vehicle among African American communities. Dr. Shelley Francis runs a network of electric vehicle enthusiasts that's all about trying to widen the tent and get a wider diversity of electric vehicle owners. She thinks the new all-electric F-150 Lightning could appeal to people who wouldn't exactly be in the market for, say, a Tesla or a Nissan Leaf. Then when you think about, say, rural communities, there's an opportunity, again, for this community to be part of this conversation. For now, the community of people

that are buying electric F-150s is just starting to grow as the first trucks roll off the assembly line. NPR's Brittany Cronin has more on this launch and why the stakes are so high for Ford and the auto industry at large. Nick Schmidt was at home when he got the call. The electric pickup truck that he reserved over a year ago, the F-150 Lightning, was finally ready to be picked up. When the dealership called me, they were just as excited as I was. And I remember coming up to the parking lot and they were all like gathered around and everybody came outside. This wasn't just any F-150 Lightning. It was the very first one to be delivered.

Schmidt lives in Standish, Michigan, a town of 1,500. His whole family farms and pickup trucks are kind of like their lifeblood. Oh, yeah. Yeah. F-150s, 250s. I mean, they're literally tools for most of my family. Schmidt works in clean energy. He loved his gas-powered F-150, but he wanted something electric. He says the lightning is just as powerful and dependable as his conventional F-150. He uses it to haul dirt and lumber around and to tow his Airstream. And the acceleration is unlike anything he's ever experienced. It's fast. I mean, for a big full-size pickup truck, it'll do, I think, 0 to 60 in 4.2 seconds or something, which is unheard of.

It was a big moment for Schmidt, but maybe an even bigger one for Ford. Ford and other automakers are desperately trying to catch up to Tesla, which dominates the electric car market. Sam Abu-Assamid at Guidehouse Insights says automakers are spending close to $200 billion over the next five years just on electric vehicles. There's a lot of money at stake. And if they're going to build millions of EVs now and try to convert the entire industry to electric, they have to have products that people actually want to buy. And that means pickup trucks. GM is rolling out an electric Silverado next year. The Ram truck is also going

electric. And automakers are watching Ford's launch to see if this gamble will pay off. Still, Ford couldn't be sure that fans of its salt-of-the-earth classic American truck would embrace an electric version. So Ford went big on advertising. They even got Jimmy Fallon to evangelize about the frunk in a spoof music video. The glitz and glam of late night aside, Ford and other automakers are in a tough spot right now. After years of buildup, Americans are clamoring for electric vehicles. And automakers don't have them. Shortages, rising costs, COVID factory shutdowns.

The auto industry has been up against all of it. And even if you can get your hands on an electric car, they're really expensive. Schmidt paid about $100,000 for his. Plus, charging is still a big issue. We took it on basically a 300 and so mile trip the first weekend we got it and ran into an issue where we couldn't find a charger. He worries that public charging infrastructure just isn't ready for long trips. And while Schmidt is all in on electric,

he thinks about his family on the farm, and he's not sure they're there yet. I'm still waiting for that moment when, you know, my Aunt Jean comes down the road in an EV and she's enjoying it. And it's just something that she felt comfortable to buy. It's the Aunt Jeans of the world the automakers need to get electric vehicles to take off. That was NPR's Brittany Cronin. As you heard there, shortages, rising costs, supply chain issues, all hurdles that automakers have to overcome if they want to succeed in a future dominated by electric cars. And that future?

Well, a lot of it depends on China, because China dominates the global supply chain when it comes to something every electric car needs, batteries. NPR's Camila Dominovsky has more. There's a lot of enthusiasm around the auto industry's big switch toward electric vehicles. God, it's good to be back in Detroit. But when President Biden visited a GM plant this past fall, there was also a strong whiff of regret. Something went wrong along the way. We stopped. We risked losing our edge as a nation. And China and the rest of the world are catching up. In fact, when it comes to the massive batteries that are essential to electric vehicles, China is way ahead. It controls something like three quarters of the market for the raw materials that go into these batteries, like lithium, cobalt, and nickel. So automakers rely on China for these minerals.

And as companies go electric, they'll need a lot more. You're looking at a scenario where demand is going to jump about eight times what it is. Kweisi Ampufu is the head of metals and mining at Bloomberg NEF. Now, it's not like China won the geological lottery and just happens to have a bunch of rich deposits. These particular minerals are in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South America, and Australia. Instead of getting lucky, China got busy. The other way of bringing metals onshore into your country is to build the refineries that are needed to actually refine these metals. And that is where the China story started 10 years ago. Beijing decided it wanted to dominate the electric

vehicle market, down to the minerals. China has an authoritarian government that often intervenes in the economy. When it makes a decision like this, it acts on it. If you're a large country, if you're willing to put a lot of money into it, boom, guess what? You've got it. That's Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute. So today, most of the world's electric vehicle batteries are made out of stuff that has to pass through China. Some crisis could hamper China's ability to process these minerals. Or the U.S. and China might, say, slap tariffs on each other, driving car prices up. Or China might actually block minerals from reaching plants in the U.S. or Europe.

Vivas Kumar is the CEO of MitraChem, a battery component startup. Part of his sales pitch is reminding people that China has used supply chains as economic weapons before. There's growing alarm that that may happen again if the geopolitical tensions between the Chinese Communist Party and our nation's government continue. Companies like MitraChem are trying to build a new supply chain in the U.S. to reduce this risk. But China has the advantage of scale, cheap labor, and a lot of expertise. And it has historically been willing to take a lax approach to environmental standards. So one question is, how much are companies or the U.S. government willing to pay to reduce their reliance on China? Maybe China wouldn't disrupt supplies. It too would suffer from a collapse in these supply chains.

But it's a risk. It is a conversation that is happening at every single boardroom. That conversation is happening on Capitol Hill too. The bipartisan infrastructure law dedicates billions of dollars to build up a domestic supply chain for batteries. But even an all-out effort would take time. Here's Ampufu, the metals expert. China saw the vision 10 years ago, and then it took a while.

It took almost a decade for the fruits to start bearing. And so, yeah, there's no short-term fix here. For now, the supply chains for these in-demand batteries are firmly anchored in China. That report from NPR's Kamila Dominovsky. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.