Not Gunna Be Enough Lithium24 Jul 2018 11:06
On a hot summer afternoon in central Germany, the new CEO of one of the world’s largest automakers sinks into a white leather armchair, digs his shoes into the thick shag carpet under his feet, and grins. Herbert Diess, who took over as Volkswagen AG’s chief executive in April, has his tall frame folded inside a cherry-red chunk of metal that closely resembles a car—except for the fact that it’s missing a steering wheel, pedals, gears, or anything else you’d normally expect to find in an automobile. The slick contraption is a VW concept car called the I.D. Vizzion. It made its debut at the Geneva Motor Show in March.
The I.D. Vizzion is more than just an experiment, however, or a living room on wheels. Rather, says Diess, it offers a glimpse of our driverless near-future. And Diess is betting heavily on a strategy built on that vision—staking hundreds of millions of dollars on electric and autonomous technology. The CEO insists that getting the technology right will be key to the survival of his company.
“Look what happened when we went from horse-drawn carriages to cars, from chemical-based photography to digital photography,” says Diess, sitting in Volkswagen’s gargantuan factory headquarters in Wolfsburg, a sleepy company town of 125,000 people, some 140 miles west of Berlin. “There was huge disruption. Very few of the successful companies remained. Kodak did not make it, and they knew what was coming.”
Few businesses sit so squarely in the crosshairs of a tech upheaval as the auto industry, whose very existence has depended for more than 100 years on a single invention: the combustion engine. Today, the industry overall sells about 80 million cars a year. Last year, a full 10.8 million of those came from the Volkswagen Group, more than the 10.4 million sold by Toyota, which had held the top-selling spot for years.
THE FUTURE , 80 Million cars per annum is a staggering 3.2 Million tonnes of Lithium required per annum and we only currently produce 200,000 tonnes
http://fortune.com/longform/volkswagen-dieselgate-electric-fix/
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