Climate change is inconsequential (because Peak Oil is a bigger issue)

[Pemalite]

fatslob-:O said:

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 ... 

I never once claimed that Lithium wasn't superior, so that's a bit of a red herring right there. All comes down to price/performance/weight.

Nickel-Zinc is improving as well... Especially when building the Zinc structure so that there is less Zinc Oxide forming.
Structure is going to be the main frontier of battery technology going forward rather than chemistries.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/05/a-zinc-battery-that-could-compete-with-your-favorite-rechargeables/
http://www.innovationtoronto.com/2017/04/nickel-zinc-ni-zn-batteries-provides-an-energy-content-and-rechargeability-that-rival-lithium-ion-batteries/

The advantage Nickel-Metal Hydride has over Lithium is that you don't need expensive, heavy, complicated fire prevention mechanisms either, same goes for Nickel-Zinc... But as Lithium hasn't stopped improving, it's generally an all-round superior alternative anyway, minus the fire potential hazard.

As for cycle issues... You need to remember, these packs are made of often hundreds/thousands of 18650 cells, so you often will not be able to get 1000~ cycles out of a hybrids entire pack because you will have some cells with shorter lifetimes than that. Quality cells can likely even go past those amounts of cycles too.

I tend to get about a year out of my packs with a daily cycle, regardless if it's Manganese or Phosphate.