@macacator

The first part: I totally agree. (Of interest: there's a company making a-la-carte electric vehicles where you basically choose all the elements you want -- including, as far as I can tell, the dashboard electronics)

The second part is more of a problem. It's comparing disparate things:

• mining for consumption (you mine a ton of stuff, then set it on fire to go some number of miles) vs. capacity (you mine a ton of stuff, and that lets you store enough energy to go some number of miles -- over and over again)
• a very large amount of material mined per year, on an ongoing basis, for as long as we're still using the technology (internal combustion engines) vs. a much smaller amount of material, mined just while we're making batteries in that particular way (and there are several new battery technologies under development which don't use any conflict minerals)

I can't quickly find a single chart which shows them both together (though I did see one recently), but these two charts combined give a pretty good idea of the scale:

• crude oil vs. top 10 metals (lithium is not in the top 10 metals)
• all the metals we mined, which does show lithium (2nd-to-last row)

I apologize if I'm coming across like a know-it-all, but I've been fighting this disinformation since the Dubya era -- it's one of those zombie memes that keeps popping back up no matter how many times or how thoroughly it is debunked.

@mcnado