EV makers face cash squeeze amid soaring battery, production costs

In the transition from gas-powered vehicles to electric, the fuel every automaker is after these days is cold hard cash.

Established automakers and startups alike are rolling out new battery-powered models in an effort to meet growing demand. Ramping up production of a new model was already a fraught and expensive process, but rising material costs and tricky regulations for federal incentives are squeezing coffers even further.

Prices of the raw materials used in many electric-vehicle batteries — lithium, nickel and cobalt — have soared over the last two years as demand has skyrocketed, and it may be several years before miners are able to meaningfully increase supply.

Complicating the situation further, new U.S. rules governing EV buyer incentives will require automakers to source more of those materials in North America over time if they want their vehicles to qualify.

The result: new cost pressures for what was already an expensive process.

Automakers routinely spend hundreds of millions of dollars designing and installing tooling to build new high-volume vehicles — before a single new car is shipped. Nearly all global automakers now maintain hefty cash reserves of $20 billion or more. Those reserves exist to ensure that the companies can continue work on their next new models if and when a recession (or a pandemic) takes a bite out of their sales and profits for a few quarters.

All that money and time can be a risky bet: If the new model doesn’t resonate with customers, or if manufacturing problems delay its introduction or compromise quality, the automaker might not make enough to cover what it spent.

For newer automakers, the financial risks to designing a new electric vehicle can be existential.

Take Tesla. When the automaker began preparations to launch its Model 3, CEO Elon Musk and his team planned a highly automated production line for the Model 3, with robots and specialized machines that reportedly cost well over a billion dollars. But some of that automation didn’t work as expected, and Tesla moved some final-assembly tasks to a tent outside its factory.

Tesla learned a lot of expensive lessons in the process. Musk said later called the experience of launching the Model 3 “production hell” and said it nearly brought Tesla to the brink of bankruptcy.

As newer EV startups ramp up production, more investors are learning that taking a car from design to production is capital-intensive. And in the current environment, where deflated stock prices and rising interest rates have made it harder to raise money than it was just a year or two ago, EV startups’ cash balances are getting close attention from Wall Street.

Here’s where some of the most prominent American EV startups of the last few years stand when it comes to cash on hand: