- What? Tesla doesn’t have their own batteries they buy them from Panasonic.
- Yes, cars are bad and EVs only improve emissions while worsening infrastructure wear.
Comment on Activists set to protest Tesla Germany factory’s expansion days after sabotage attack
rockSlayer@lemmy.world 6 months agoI have a few personal reasons why we should be opposed to Tesla, and I’m almost certain that most of my reasons don’t overlap with justifications used by the radical activists.
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Tesla is gatekeeping their battery tech, which is objectively better than existing lithium battery cells. This means that everyone else is consuming more electricity than necessary simply so Tesla can make more profit.
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Lithium is a heavy metal, so when it leeches into the water during mining and manufacturing it will cause higher cancer rates and harm the surrounding environment.
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Lithium is a rare earth metal, so our existing economic systems lead to extreme forms of exploitation and oppression in areas with a high amount of the mineral.
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Individual transportation does reduce emissions when it’s entirely electric, but it’s not the whole picture. Car-centric infrastructure is extremely inefficient for transporting people. The amounts of concrete, metal rebar, and plastic that goes into traveling by car will still be necessary if we just switch to EVs.
Traister101@lemmy.today 6 months ago
rockSlayer@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Panasonic is being encouraged by Tesla to work with them to develop a proprietary lithium battery cell that has significant advantages over the 1865 cell.
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Wrong. Lithium is one of the very lightest metals.
Wrong. Lithium isn’t rare at all.
rockSlayer@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You’re right. I was thinking of cobalt, a different essential element in battery production. However that doesn’t negate the facts on those points.
barsoap@lemm.ee 6 months ago
“Rare earth metal”, not “rare metal”. Rare earth metals don’t occur naturally in concentrations comparable to other metals: Noone ever found a lithium nugget, oxidised or not, you have to sift through cube metres of soil to get at a little bit of the material no matter where you get your soil from.
And lithium being light doesn’t mean that you want to have it in your ground water. Do you want to medicate, or overdose, the whole population on the stuff.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 6 months ago
Rare-earth element is a specific technical term. Lithium is absolutely not among them.
One of the main sources lithium is extracted from is brines. That is, it's already in the water and we take it out.
barsoap@lemm.ee 6 months ago
You’re right, brain fart. Still rare earths aren’t rare, and lithium isn’t non-toxic. Ballpark lead? Where’s a toxicologist when you need them. The ores also tend to contain little lithium: Lead and tin are rarer but have very pure ores in rather dense deposits, in that sense mining lithium is nearly as annoying as mining rare earth metals.