Asked on Australian television why his company built its lithium processing plant in South Korea rather than at home, the chief executive of PLS did not dodge it. Australian input costs are higher, he said, so the company voted with its feet. Australia has been digging the rock and shipping it out for decades. What it cannot order, at any price, is what he credits China with: several decades of building the industry out in one place. The ore was never the hard part.
That distinction turns up in four other places today at four other scales. The Audi E7X is the loudest version of it. By carwow's account, Audi has licensed its name to a joint venture with SAIC, and the resulting car has the word Audi spelled out on the steering wheel and no four rings anywhere on the body. carwow's tester finds a 680 horsepower electric SUV with rear wheel steering, a large screen and a £36,000 price in China against roughly £80,000 for a Q8. What he does not find is the way a European Audi rides. A trademark travels. A chassis department does not.
In a Californian garage the same problem is a computer. Kim Java says Tesla has stopped building her Model X, and the upgrade she actually wants is not a newer body but the newer processor in the family's Model Y. There is no part number for that. So she wraps the car she owns and keeps thinking about one she does not need.
Then there is the arithmetic version. Out of Spec's $11 a month Nissan Leaf is going back after two years, and one participant totals his real spend at roughly $4,000 once registration and insurance are counted. The lease was the negotiated part. Everything attached to it was not. The Lectron Nexus arrives at the same place from the other direction: a $399 charger that survives a deep freeze and a heat lamp, then loses buyers because there is no dip switch to make it draw less than 48 amps. The cheap missing piece decides who can have it.
What to watch is which of these gaps closes. State of Charge reports a connected Pro version is a couple of months out, which turns a hardware limit into a setting. Australia's answer is narrower and more interesting: process the concentrate partway at the mine, stop short of battery grade, and skip the step where you have to beat China on cost outright. Whether that midstream idea scales will be answered by plants ramping, not by strategies published. The badge problem is the one with no fix. Nobody has worked out how to license the part that took decades to learn.
An Audi With No Four Rings, 680 Horsepower and a £36,000 Price
carwow drives the Audi E7X, an electric SUV built in China through Audi's joint venture with SAIC, which the video notes also owns MG. The host reports it is not sold in the UK, Europe or the United States, and that the four rings appear nowhere on it, only the name written out. The figures as presented: two motors, 680 horsepower, 800 Nm, 2.6 tonnes, 0 to 60 mph in four seconds and a standing quarter mile just over 12. The diesel Q8 benchmark returned 6.1 and 14.7 seconds, and stopped about a metre shorter from 60 mph.
Efficiency is where it slips. He reports a 100 kWh gross pack and 2.6 miles per kWh over more than 1,000 km, around 260 miles against 400 claimed, though he also reports 900 volt architecture and 200 miles added in 10 minutes on a quick enough charger. Boot space is 680 litres, roughly ten percent up on the Q8.
Worth keeping in view: £36,000 is a Chinese domestic price, and since he reports the car is not sold here there is no European dealer network or parts supply behind it, so the comparison is interesting rather than actionable outside China. His verdict on the driving is satisfactory rather than fine, with the finesse being what the licence did not carry.
The $11 a Month Leaf Goes Back, and the Lease Was Never the Cost
Out of Spec Reviews closes a two year lease on a 2025 Nissan Leaf S, the base car with a 40 kWh pack and about 150 miles of range, on a deal the channel negotiated with a Colorado dealer at roughly $500 down and payments of $12 to $18 a month. The host says the channel's first car developed a battery fault within a few hundred miles, sat waiting on a pack that could not be sourced, and was replaced by Nissan under lemon law with a second car that has been fault free since.
The most useful part is the arithmetic nobody does at signing. One participant totals his two years at around $4,000: the deposit, roughly $300 in payments, $1,100 to $1,200 in registration and about $2,000 in insurance. He drove it 158 miles. Registration and insurance are generally priced off a vehicle's value rather than what you paid, which is why a discounted lease does not produce a discounted total.
Another says he returned his with 6,500 miles and no damage he could see, then received a bill for $720 in excess wear charges, $791 with tax and fees, followed days later by an offer to waive most of it if he leased another Nissan. That is his account as presented in the video, and Nissan's position is not included.
Her Model X Is Discontinued, So She Wrapped It Instead
Kim Java's Model X came back to factory white when its old wrap was removed, she disliked the result, and the video follows a colour change to an iridescent film with paint protection over it. The reasoning for keeping the car is the part worth reading.
She reports that used Model X examples around 50,000 miles are now selling for $45,000 to $55,000, up from the high thirties and low forties, and attributes the lift to Tesla having stopped building them. The upgrade she says she wants is not a newer or larger car. It is the newer onboard computer in the household's Model Y, which she says parks and predicts destinations in ways her older hardware cannot. There is no route to it short of buying a different car.
That is the shape of the decision for a lot of long term EV owners now. Mechanical parts have always been replaceable and software increasingly is too, but the processor those updates run on is fixed the day the car is built. On the wrap itself, the installer shows the difference between vinyl and paint protection film by pushing a key through one and struggling with the other, and puts a full colour change from around $4,000 depending on the vehicle.
Australia Wants to Refine Its Own Lithium, and the Cost Numbers Keep Winning
ABC's The Business reports from a new Western Australian demonstration plant that will turn 27,000 tonnes of spodumene concentrate into 3,000 tonnes of lithium phosphate from September. Lithium phosphate feeds LFP cathodes, which the report notes EV makers favour on cost and safety, rather than the hydroxide nickel based cathodes use.
The record so far is uneven. The programme reports that Covalent, the Wesfarmers and SQM joint venture, is expected to produce 50,000 tonnes a year at Kwinana, with part of the output contracted to LG Energy Solution. Albemarle's Kemerton refinery, planned for 100,000 tonnes of hydroxide a year from the Greenbushes mine, is described as in care and maintenance. The owners of the TLEA plant are reported to disagree on its future, and IGO is said to have written its stake down to zero. An academic interviewed calls these the teething troubles of a new industry and says roughly ten years of support will be needed.
PLS chief executive Dale Henderson tells the programme lithium has moved from around $600 a tonne at the low point to above $2,000, and that Australian input costs make refining hard to compete on. The interviewer cites PLS telling investors global demand should rise more than 200 percent by 2040. His downstream joint venture with POSCO is in South Korea, which he describes as voting with their feet.
A $399 Charger That Passes Every Test Except the One About Your Panel
State of Charge reviews the Lectron Nexus, Lectron's second generation wall unit, at $399.99 in all four configurations: 48 amp hardwired or 40 amp NEMA 14-50, each with a J1772 or NACS connector. The tested unit left a deep freeze at -12.5°F with a workable cable, survived five waist high connector drops while frozen, held full 48 amp output through two hours under a heat lamp at 147°F, and restarted seconds after a simulated power cut. He scores it 4.05 out of five and rates the build a clear step up on the first generation V-Box.
The reviewer's complaint is an absence rather than a fault: no dip switch, no dial and no app, so the unit cannot be told to draw less than 48 amps. That requires a dedicated 60 amp circuit under the 80 percent continuous load rule, and rules it out for anyone whose panel cannot supply one and whose car cannot limit its own AC draw. He also notes that hardwiring directly, rather than through the supplied pigtail and a junction box, means opening the case and voiding the three year warranty.
For a lot of houses that 60 amp circuit is the expensive line on the quote, not the charger, since it can mean panel work costing more than the unit. A connected Pro version is said to be a couple of months out.
Bottom line: The E7X is the day's best value story and its most misleading one. A £36,000 car with 680 horsepower is not a bargain if what you wanted was how a European Audi rides, because that was never included in the licence. The smaller-money version of the same lesson: buy the Lectron Nexus only if you already have 60 spare amps, and price a lease off the registration and insurance rather than the payment. The cheap number on the front is almost never the number that decides anything.
Commentary on third-party videos. Figures and claims are as presented in the sources and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.