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fatslob-:O on 01 April 2019
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Pemalite said:

Many electric vehicles actually use Nickel-Metal Hydride cells. So Lithium isn't a requirement for electric vehicles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93metal_hydride_battery#Electric_vehicles

Even then you have a ton of variants of Lithium based cells which by extension have different power characteristics and thus use differing amounts of lithium.
Like Lithium Ion Manganese, Lithium Sulfur, Lithium Cobalt and so on.

My Electric Motorcycle uses the Manganese variant... And my Electric Bicycle uses the Lithium Ion Phosphate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_ion_manganese_oxide_battery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery

The big increases in energy in the battery sphere though won't be chemistries per-sey. It will actually be in building nano-structures.

Nickel-Zinc could be a good replacement for Nickel-Metal Hydride cells anyway, they have a higher nominal voltage too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel-zinc_battery

Nickel-Metal Hydride had 3% of the total market share of batteries in 2005 so you can conclude how well they fared later on. Nearly all of the modern electric vehicles like the Tesla 3 now uses lithium ion batteries because they're just straight up superior. Lithium based batteries are far lighter and are capable of delivering more mileage capacity making it more energy efficient for acceleration ... (don't have to spend as much energy while driving since the battery is lighter)

@Bold Let's hope so because lithium ion technology has been the incumbent for nearly 3 decades ... (we're running out of lithium to mine very quickly)

The problem with Nickel-Zinc is that they don't last for very many charge cycles. Who's going to buy a battery that can only last 30 full charges compared to a lithium ion battery where it'll last for 1000+ full charges before degradation ? It's a massive inconvenience having to replace your your battery more frequently. Now if Nickel-Zinc lasted for at least 500-1000 charge cycles then we could very well easily have a low cost winner but until then lithium cells are especially recommended ...