Global EV battery use passes 1TWh

Canada’s Adamas Intelligence says the world’s car makers deployed more than a terawatt hour of electric-vehicle battery capacity in 2025, topping that marker for the first time, as their EV raw materials spend hit US$15.6 billion for the year.

The Toronto advisory firm said the 2025 EV battery capacity deployment level was nearly four-times that of five years ago but the value of lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt and manganese used by automakers in their vehicles was about 50% of the 2022 material bill.

Increasing Chinese EV market penetration and the lower average battery-material spend of leading manufacturers such as BYD is impacting total global annual battery material costs.

UK-based Barclays Research has said BYD’s average EV battery cost of $6000 per vehicle is below competitors such as Tesla at circa-$7000 and Ford and GM ($13,000).

“While many automakers over recent decades outsourced design, parts, engineering and manufacturing, BYD is highly vertically integrated,” Barclays said. “As a result it controls its own component costs and has been able to drive down the prices of its vehicles while remaining profitable and increasing quality. It operates its own lithium mines, lithium processing and does its own battery production, computer chip manufacturing, electric motors, electronic controls and more.”

Adamas said global EV battery capacity deployed in 2025 was nearly four-times the 286GWh brought to market in 2021 and about 10-times the market size in 2019.

It said Volkswagen overtook Tesla as the largest buyer of battery metals in 2025.

Volkswagen project manager raw material Mauricio Jankoski da Cunha (pictured above) told the 2025 IMARC conference in Sydney, Australia, the world’s second biggest automotive group was keen to build closer ties with “responsible” miners in Australia and elsewhere as it closely monitored costs, availability and also standards of production of “high risk” materials such as lithium, nickel and cobalt.

“Our aim here definitely to go deep in the supply chain, to get to know you and to understand [how] we can work together on suitable, reliable raw material supply,” he said.