Ed Conway on the new mineral trade wars

Chris: If you wish to buy the rare earth compound dysprosium oxide, used in magnets for electric cars, wind turbines, and more, the Argus assessed spot price in the U.S. is around 10 times higher than if you were to buy it in China. A year ago, it was just four-fold, and even less before. This widening gap, of course, isn't about shipping costs so much as it is about the geopolitics of free trade, and the attempts to block it. But as my guest today can explain almost better than anyone else in his new book, the weaponization of trade is as old as trade itself. From British export controls of wool in the Netherlands in the 1300s to the trade barriers of the Opium Wars and Corn Laws in the 1800s, to China's export controls of those same rare earth metals back in 2010. The only caveat today is that the impacts of that weaponization in our increasingly interconnected world stand to be potentially far greater than before. The question, then, I'm thinking, is, where does this leave markets? How credible are the efforts to diversify supply away from its cheapest sources? Do price floors work? What do these regional markets mean for the standardization of goods and price assessments that we've come to expect from free trade? I'm Chris Welch, Senior Reporter for battery materials at Argus Media, and to discuss all of that and more, it's a real pleasure for me to say that I'm joined by Ed Conway, author of the new book, which I have here, "Trade World: The Ties That Bound Our Past and May Unravel Our Future." Ed, thank you very much for your time. It's a real pleasure.

Ed: Thanks, Chris. Thanks. Nice to be here.

Chris: I'll get straight into it. I wanna touch on diversification, so maybe just go straight to the deep end. As you mentioned in the book, there is a rich history of countries and companies weaponizing their grip on trading relations. Back in 2010, as I mentioned in my intro, it did actually lead to two firms, so, I'm thinking of Lynus in Australia and Mountain Pass in the U.S. being built, both of which are still standing today. I'm curious whether you think these export controls and bans often have this permanent impact on diversification of supply, or whether...to what extent do you think that export controls ever really do actually have a permanent impact once prices have come down?

Ed: It's a great question. It's, kind of, this is what we're gonna be wrestling with for quite some time, because it's like, you know, your intro spelled it out really well. We, for the last [inaudible 00:02:15] 50, 60 years, I guess, have been living ever increasingly in a world where we've been able to focus primarily on price, and focus primarily on the kind of economic fundamentals, because that was a world where it was becoming easier and cheaper to move stuff around the planet. You could kind of be assured that if you can order something from China or from wherever it is, or from Europe to get to China, that it would turn up. And, over time, we have kind of arranged the world accordingly. So, the nature of the planet that we're living on at the moment, the nature of supply chains that are truly global, which is something that actually is quite new, that's something that a lot of people have kind of felt that they could take for granted for a long time, and the thing that I'm kind of interested in is the question of whether we're in this moment where all of those preconceptions kind of change, and all of the assumptions about the way the world economy works kind of melt away.

And if those preconceptions change, then all of a sudden, there is at least a geopolitical logic behind some of what you're talking about, you know, the kind of spread and the cost of dysprosium on one side of the planet from the other, because, all of a sudden, it's not just about economics, it's not just about the fundamentals of how much it costs to refine your metal in one part of the planet and how much it costs to ship it over. It's about this other kind of intangible thing on top of all of that, which is geopolitics. And I think, you know, we're still kind of in the early stages of working out how permanent that is. You know, trade wars themselves, there's nothing particularly new about them. There's nothing new about countries using their control of a critical substance or critical product as a form of kind of geopolitical leverage. And the example I kind of give in the book is that, well, these days, people talk about China and rare earths as if there's something kind of novel about that. Well, actually, back in the kind of period of the Hundred Years War, so, going back to the kind of 14th century, 15th century, the critical material that was key to one of the most important industries of the world, of the day, was wool.

Chris: It was the oil of the time.

Ed: And it was kind of the oil of the time, because if you look at total GDP, and you look at how much of it is constituted by wool, it was a large proportion. And it's...so, at least within Europe, and it so happened that England was able to produce wool, in the same way that China is today, England was able to produce wool far finer, and at a far lower cost than most other countries around Europe, and therefore, it had a stranglehold over this critical material. And it used that stranglehold as a kind of form of leverage when it was going to war with France. And kind of, in the same way that President Xi has with rare earths, basically started to impose controls and restrictions and embargoes on that wool to certain countries, to try and get them on side. And so, the notion of using critical minerals as a form of economic weapon isn't particularly new. But what is new is the extent to which we have created a kind of global economy that is so, so intertwined. That is genuinely new. And what I wonder is, and it's the same thing that we've all been kind of scratching our chins about for quite some time, you know, I'm wondering about the extent to which people are willing, and I think this is particularly, you know, in OECD countries, people are willing to pay higher prices for things that they previously got for quite cheap from China, purely to ensure their security. And I just think that's something of an imponderable at the moment. It's not the first time we've kind of wrestled with these questions, because we were talking about similar things in regard to food, you know, 200 years ago, when it was the kind of Corn Laws in England. It was the same thing. What do you prioritize? Do you prioritize getting something cheap, or do you prioritize ensuring security of supply domestically? Same debate. But we're having it now over, you know, everything from rare earths to critical minerals to things that go into defense. And also food, you know? I think the conversation about the extent to which food should be produced domestically, that's probably gonna come back as well. And if you're in the U.S., you're Donald Trump, and you're kind of making a case for, you know, he's saying that everything should be produced domestically, even if you're not necessarily able to do it, realistically.

So, I kind of think, you know, some of these, some of the debates are kind of, there's echoes there. But the scale of disruption it would involve to try and, you know, create domestic chains for so many of these things, the scale of disruption would be enormous, just because of the nature of the global economy, and how intertwined it is these days. And that makes it an interesting and quite scary time to be thinking about policy, because it's no longer just about those fundamentals that have been able to, you know, you've been able to rely on for a long time as kind of guiding where policy goes.

Chris: I agree. I think it's just a question of whether the government sort of thinks long term, and maybe when there are military uses at play, it has the capacity to do that. I think one of the examples we've seen of trying to tackle that is, especially, like, sticking with that rare earths theme, is price floor. So, we've seen the U.S. government sort of offer a price floor for MP materials, for its rare earths. Clearly, the military application is a key incentive. I just wonder, I mean, there were, obviously, as you mention in the book, there were plenty of attempts to re-industrialize, and even failed attempts as well, UK trying to revive its cotton industry, or even Levi's trying to sort of do everything onshore in the U.S., as you mentioned. I wonder how durable you think price floors are, like these interchanging markets, say, for rare earths?

Ed: Well, it's mostly, I think it does come back to that question, which is, you know, things will be more expensive with price floors, because you're ultimately trying to support domestic production. I mean, and it's pretty marginal with rare earths, obviously, because it's, you know, it's expensive by the ton, but it's a pretty fringe ingredient when it comes to, you know, the totality of the cost of a phone, or indeed a piece of weaponry. But even so, the direction is up in terms of price. And almost every bit of pressure over the past kind of 200 years has been to try to reduce kind of costs, and reduce prices. And coming at a time when, you know, this is an inflationary time for the world. So, you've got kind of oil prices up, kind of really high, pretty high, you know, at the time we're talking, kind of over $100 a barrel, you've got kind of gas prices rising really high as well. You've got bond yields, which are going up, which are partly connected to that, but partly also connected to the fact that you've got enormous levels of debt within the developed world, the kind of OECD. And, actually, much of the emerging world. Put all of it together, and it's like, it's really inflationary.

And the question is whether, on top of that inflation, you also now have this kind of protectionism-related inflation. And I think that's, you know, like, again, that kind of, that makes it a more intense time to be thinking about policymaking, because the jeopardy is greater, and the extent to which people can be affected by it is greater. So, I think price floors, you know, are just part of that kind of mechanism. And it's interesting to me, you know, thinking about the UK, obviously, just because I'm based in the UK, we've got this tungsten mine in, Tungsten West is the latest kind of company that's running it, the mine has been there for a long time, for, kind of, basically, 100 years. Actually, slightly more than 100 years.

Chris: They're trying to revive it?

Ed: And it's a pretty good...well, it's a pretty good tungsten resource. It's, supposedly, it's the second-biggest tungsten resource in the world. But they just have not been able to compete for the last, you know, for the last 50 years. Basically, they haven't been able to compete in peacetime, because it is so hard to compete with China on cost. And so, right now, you know, you've got the UK government stepping in and saying it's gonna have an offtake agreement, and it's gonna put a bit of money into it. It's a different, slightly different mechanism to price floors, and who knows whether there would be a price floor for that kind of thing in the UK. But either way, it's the same thing. We're gonna have more expensive tungsten, it's gonna be good old British tungsten, and you know, in America, it'll be kind of good old American rare earths. But for most consumers, what they will see is a bit more in the way of cost. And whether that just gets kind of subsumed within this general sense of kind of everything's getting more expensive, or not, we're gonna be living in a kind of more inflationary world in the next few years. And I think that is gonna be quite traumatic. And the extent to which that forces people to think, okay, well, maybe it doesn't matter so much that we're getting so much stuff from China, or maybe it's okay. I just don't know, because I think that is kind of an imponderable.

But that's part of why I kind of wrote this book, is to start to begin to think those thoughts. And I kind of found that, just in the same way that when I thought about "Material World," and tried to depict the world from a slightly different angle to the conventional one that, you know, journalism mostly does. I'm a familiar angle for you, and for people who are kind of in the Argus community, but for the rest of us, at least, totally unfamiliar. The same thing with this new book, is, like, to say, okay, well, here's how supply chains actually function. Here's what the label on whatever it is you're buying isn't really telling you, and what it isn't really telling you is this kind of world of complexity and relationships, and different ingredients that you never knew were actually within whatever thing you're buying. And only when you kind of start to understand that web of interrelationships do you then start to realize, okay, what it would take to actually unpick it, and what the damage would be if you were going to unpick it. And also, the kind of marvels of that invisible structure of different relationships, that's basically supplying us with the stuff we need.

Chris: I think we've been, I mean, especially here in the UK, we've been thinking about that for a while, with leaving the European Union as well, and just untangling that web of trade.

Ed: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: I guess, perhaps, you know, it always comes back to the military uses first and foremost, and at least in, like, the lithium market, for example, in a market, 2 million tons, military use is something only about 5,000 tons. So, actually, it's quite a small, like you say, it's quite a small portion, so if you're looking to protect it, the financial cost might not be so great, at least for that. One of the really [crosstalk 00:13:044]

Ed: And also, with the rare earths, it was, I mean, like, you know, it was interesting, wasn't it, with the rare earths, about the particular types of rare earths that were, you know, restricted in the end. And they made great efforts, both the Chinese and the Americans, you know, to ensure that the consumer stuff that goes into your AirPods and so on, the kind of non-heat-resistant kind of neodymium, that that was kind of, for the most part, excluded. And so, it's this, can you kind of maintain having those two parallel tracks of kind of controls and negotiations? Or does everything just bleed into higher prices throughout?

Chris: Yeah. And with those rare earths, I mean, I mentioned at the start that there's a tenfold price gap, but of course, that's only without an export license, and if you have one, then, if you have an export license, then it's a completely different price, so you have these two tiers of pricing, for the same country, in the USA, depending on whether or not you get an export license, whether or not it's military. One of the really interesting ideas that you mentioned, that even, to me, was quite new as well, was the transfer, not just of goods, which seems to be impossible to stop, but the transfer of ideas as well. And I think you mentioned in the book, General Motors joint venture with Toyota, NUMMI. Even further back than that, you've got Britain's textile manufacturing benefiting from the imported ideas. I'm thinking in today's world of, in the battery world, say, Chinese battery maker, CATL, and its joint venture with Stellantis, or the miner, Huayou Cobalt, and its JV with the Korean firm, POSCO, to make cathode active material for batteries. In all of these, the devil is in the detail, I'm thinking, in terms of to what extent are you having tech transfer, like China benefited from in the '80s, when it, you know, brought over Volkswagen and all the other car makers? To what extent do you have that tech transfer, to enable some sort of self-sufficiency in the long term? Do you think that the flow of know-how and ideas is still just as hard to stop as the trade of goods themselves?

Ed: Yeah, I think it is in the long... I mean, you know, it's a matter of time. And eventually, ideas do just transmit. And actually, for me, the striking thing about what's happened...so, you know, I kind of went on this kind of deep dive, going back to the, well, hundreds of years, to the kind of early Industrial Revolution. And, you know, then, what was it that brought some of the first factories to the UK? It was partly that the English people were stealing some of the secrets from the Italians in how to construct factories to spin silk. And then the same thing when America was building its own industries, it was stealing the blueprints of spinning factories and wheeling factories from England. And to me, actually, you know, there's lots of talk about kind of industrial espionage these days, and there's certainly some of it going on. But for the most part, most of the kind of tech transfer that's happened, you know, from OECD nations towards China, it's kind of happened above board rather than below board, as far as I can kind of tell. I mean, there's definitely been, you know, some other stuff going on as well.

Chris: A lot with [crosstalk 00:16:06] so on.

Ed: Yeah, like, with Tesla. So, like, with the JVs, you know, the car industry is the obvious example, kind of JVs there. Like with companies that China has bought, so that, you know, there's the famous example of that steel plant in Germany, which was literally transplanted, brick-by-brick, across to China. There's the car companies, like, I don't know, MG Rover, which have been bought out by Chinese companies. So, that's above board, as is the fact, and I think this is, to me, more interesting, and I think a more serious thing for the car industry to scratch their chins over, which is that, a lot of the time, when people think about Chinese cars right now, they think, understandably, they think about EVs, and they think about batteries. And that is an enormous part of this story, which obviously is that China has such a lead in battery production, all the way down, you know, all the way down the chain, as you know.

But actually, you know, when you look at the nature of car making, it's not just batteries where China is getting a kind of extraordinary kind of advantage and a lead. It is, when you look at the kind of 30,000 components that go into the average car, and you consider that most of those components are not made by the OEMs, but are made by the tier one, tier two, tier three suppliers that produce stuff for them, you know, whether it's just cogs and metal parts that go into engines, or into drivetrains, or into everything else. It used to be the case that much of that stuff was produced domestically in Europe, and domestically in the U.S. An increasing fraction of that is being imported these days. And the reason it's being imported is that, you know, from the '90s to the 2000s, American carmakers in particular, but also European carmakers, were desperate to try and cut their costs. And one of the ways they cut their costs is they basically offshored a lot of the production of the cogs and the nuts and the bolts and everything else, to China, because that was the cheapest place, particularly after, you know, 2001, 2002.

And the upshot of that now is that the Chinese tier one, tier two, tier three suppliers to the car industry are incredibly adept at making really good parts, which...and they're adept because we basically, you know, we being America and Europe, kind of helped to teach them how to make this stuff, in the same way, you know, that Apple wanted to produce cheap iPhones at enormous scale, and it has very methodically helped to teach Foxconn and other companies how to make those phones, so that Foxconn is basically the best maker of phones, in terms of quality, anywhere in the world. In the same way that Nike and Adidas have moved their production of sneakers to Vietnam, or to China and then Vietnam over time, to the extent that those countries are better at making trainers now than we would be in Europe and in America. You know, when Adidas and Nike tried to set up a factory to make, you know, trainers domestically, within North America, and Adidas tried to do one in, I think, Germany, they realized that A, the trainers were gonna be too expensive, but B, there were certain kind of techniques they actually didn't really know how to make anymore.

And so, the point here being that, in the car industry, the tidal wave, I think, that's facing Europe and America, well, particularly Europe, really, of car exports from China, it's not just a symptom of electrification, it's not just a symptom of EVs. It's a symptom of the fact that China's depth within the car industry... So, it's [crosstalk 00:18:48]

Chris: They make a third of all cars, I think, in the world, I think. Yeah.

Ed: Yeah. But also, they make, I think, I don't know if this would stack up, but I suspect they make a greater proportion of the parts that go into cars in the world.

Chris: Yeah.

Ed: And that, to me, is kind of significant, because that's showing that... Because if you think about the bloody act of making a car, if you wanna get semi-philosophical about it, the act of actually making a car, these days, it's not really the OEM that's making the car. It's assembling parts. Most of them are assemblies, so that it's a full assembly, that it just gets bolted in, in the dashboard or the seats or whatever it might be. There's some metal bending and molding and so on that happens, some body parts, some of the engine, the drivetrain, that kind of thing. But getting towards 80% of the car these days is produced by someone else, and then just assembled into place. And so, if that lower bit is no longer controlled by the OEMs, and if those lower bits are done more adeptly by China than anywhere else in the world, then that is raising the question of who is actually kind of making the cars. And that, to me, is just as, if not more important than the whole story of China being so dominant in battery production. It's not just the batteries, it is the rest of the foundation for what eventually, you, as the OEM, put your badge on to the front of the car. But the rest of it is kind of often made by someone else, and that someone else looks like it might increasingly be China.

Chris: I think there was maybe the most extraordinary stat of the book was you sort of just slightly dismantled the NHTSA's sort of attempts at looking at, you know, what's produced in the U.S. And then there was a stat which had said that 75% of the car's value in Henry Ford's day was produced within the company. In the '90s, I think it was about 35%. And we're now down to about 15% of the value sits [crosstalk 00:21:40]

Ed: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Chris: As you say, we can't even call it a car maker. It's a car assembler. And I think that the impact of that that I'm interested in is pricing power, because as you lose value, I think you lose, potentially, pricing power as well. I think we've seen in recent supply crunches, car makers forced off those traditional fixed contracts, and left exposed to spot pricing for raw materials that they'd really rather not be on because they're so unreliable. And I wonder whether this shift in pricing power, away from car makers, this is another imponderable that is probably too difficult, but whether this shift in pricing power away from the car maker is inevitable, whether they can somehow claw it back, or whether the power of the free market's too strong?

Ed: It's a really good question. And I don't know. I mean, like... So, on the flip side, there's this kind of argument that says, you know, vertical integration, which is kind of what this is about. So, vertical integration, which is something that, back at the start of the motor era, Henry Ford was obsessed with, and so that's the interesting curve there. He tried to make everything, you know, all the way down to the rubber that went into his cars, or he never quite got that far. But he tried to make everything. And over time...and actually, but the thing that did for him was that basically, then the Great Depression came along. And then Ford, all of a sudden had all these factories that were, I don't know, had, like, lumber yards, they had all these forests, that were kind of cutting down trees, and they had all of these blast furnaces making steel. And all of a sudden, you know, there wasn't as much of a market for cars. And so they had to try and find buyers for all of that, all of their wood, and all of the steel and everything else. And actually, the whole vertical supply chain became a bit of a liability for Henry Ford and for Ford as a whole. And the interesting question, so, right now, roll on to where we are today, Ford is the opposite, you know. It's not vertically integrated. It's an assembler at the top, and then everyone else, you know, producing parts made by everyone else. If there's a single company in the world, or in the car industry, that is vertically integrated, or the most vertically integrated, it's probably BYD, which is able to produce, you know, an enormous amount, you know, go quite vertically through its supply chain. Because it's not just batteries. It's got semiconductors. It's got the whole, you know, it's got so much.

The question for me is, is that a strength? And then, you know, that's, I guess, the question of the kind of pricing and the control of the supply chain. Or does it prove to be a liability in the same way that it was for Henry Ford? If you have this kind of, you know, potential crisis of Chinese car-making, and, you know, you can look at the industry, look at the massive saturation, think about what would happen if all of a sudden, you know, everyone was kind of putting enormous kind of trade blockages on them. Is that a liability for BYD? Possibly. I mean, we just don't, we don't really know. And that's the interesting kind of juncture in history we're at the moment. But either way, it's a point of vulnerability for Western carmakers, and I'd be surprised if it wasn't, you know, if there wasn't much more protectionism to come, because, I mean, the reality, like, we're kind of getting towards the point where jobs are being cut, 50,000 by VW, kind of 4,000 by JLR, and BMW, I think about 8,000. That's starting to happen. When this becomes a bigger and bigger political issue, which it surely will, does that then force the European kind of nations to impose more restrictions? I'd be very surprised if it didn't. And so, that's partly why I think cars, obviously, it's not, you know, AI and all these other sexy things, but it's still, ultimately, the cornerstone of the manufacturing industry throughout much of Europe and America, because of that reason that, you know, it's not just about the OEMs, it's about the component manufacturers. And even though more and more of that stuff is coming from China, there's still plenty of those jobs in Michigan, and Illinois, and the Midlands of England, and much of the kind of, you know, the Mittelstand in Germany. And so, the combustibility of that as an economic story is kind of what makes me think it's worthy of our attention for the next few years. Because there's a lot of kind of good, well-paid jobs there that might well...well, that they are under direct threat right now. And if they go, then that kind of is the manufacturing sector, for want of a better term, really.

Chris: Yeah, I think, with that BYD example, I mean, [inaudible 00:26:06]. I think, I mean, from my own small, you know, understanding, and I'm sure you have your own as well, that their specialism is certainly in the battery, and in all the other aspects, and the tech, and the, you know...there's plenty of competition in China, so we're gonna find out pretty soon, basically, because there's some consolidating to be done. But I think, perhaps, you know, where other car makers in China are sort of trying to create smartphones on wheels, BYD even are falling behind on sort of the tech, so... While batteries are still [crosstalk 00:26:32] So, we may soon find out.

I wanna ask one final question, because I'm conscious of time. I wanna ask about standardization. I think we increasingly see, I remember, in your last book, "Material World," you highlighted the famous, perhaps maybe the greatest piece of standardization ever, which is the railway track gauge, I think, if I'm understanding that correctly, which was used for all railways. And I think, I mean, that's one example, and it's perhaps unusual. But increasingly, I think what I'm seeing, especially from the battery standpoint of LFP, and, or nickel cobalt manganese batteries, is they're increasingly specialized, and not standardized. And they're all custom-made. And on one level, you know, for us at Argus, it makes price assessing more challenging, because you've got, you know, you need to have a standardized product to assess, otherwise, you know, they're all quite different. But I'm thinking that as this happens, the market then moves more towards opaque contracts, because, you know, there's no sort of benchmark, perhaps. And I wonder maybe what works at the level of the company doesn't then work at the level of the collective, because as a country, it's good to have a standardization. To what extent do you think, another wonder, to what extent do you think we are poorer for losing some of that standardization, perhaps?

Ed: A really, really good question. And, you know, I can't say I've got kind of, like, enormously profound thoughts about it. I mean, you know, the economic history, if you look back, standardization of the kind of simple things, like kind of nuts and bolts, but yeah, railway track gauges, weights, other things, it is one of the invisible kind of cornerstones of economic productivity over time, because it's just such a time-saver, and it just, it, you know, it democratizes the ability to do stuff a lot of the time. And, if we're weaving into a world where there is a lot more in the way of kind of specialization, and... I mean, to me, it's that kind of interesting thing, isn't it? That interesting dichotomy between things being kind of open and things being closed. And, like, okay, so, on the one hand, this is not quite about standardization, but it's got a similar philosophy. You know, we're in an era now where a lot of companies are increasingly going private, so you've got kind of, you know, public corporations increasingly being kind of outweighed, in terms of scale, by private, whether it's private equity or just private capital. And that's a kind of, you know, a similar divergence.

And then at the same time, you know, think about AI right now. You've got this, to me, kind of quite fascinating debate between kind of the open and the closed systems, and the kind of proprietary systems, like the kind of OpenAI and Claudes, you know, Anthropic, and then the, there's open weight systems, which are kind of open-sourced, essentially. And, you know, I think the jury is out as to which of those systems ends up winning the day. I think that's kind of a much better case than maybe some investors think about this being a much more commoditized, open environment for AI. And I think, ultimately, in the end, those, to the extent that there is, like, a genuine advantage or a genuine superiority in the product, then that always gives a producer the ability to create something that's proprietary, doesn't it? You know, if people are willing to pay for a battery that is genuinely better than the competition, then perhaps it is kind of worth the, you know, it gives the producers the ability to kind of, to leverage that.

But by the same token, I mean, like the...and you'll know much more than I do about this, but it seems like the quantity of batteries kind of coming out of China right now, has that not somewhat commoditized the access to batteries, at least at one level, if not at the top level? I mean, I don't know. You're much closer to that than I am, because I've been thinking about random stuff like bread and clothes in the last year or so. But I'd kind of always been, kind of thought that over time, batteries would get kind of cheaper and cheaper, and then become somewhat more commoditized, and that the main, there would be the kind of, the proprietary element with chemistries, and then there's the other kind of proprietary element of, like, you know, the battery pack, and the extent to which you're kind of making that modular. And then you've got this other kind of interesting dichotomy between, like, the recyclability of them, versus the kind of safety element. I thought it was more gonna be about that than about the chemistry side of it. But I don't know, you tell me.

Chris: No, I think it's tricky. And perhaps there is some standardization, but it's just maybe slightly discreet, and it's just behind our backs, and so the open market that we rely on for sort of price assessments is maybe trickier with car-making, [inaudible 00:31:52] But it's hard to say. In any case, yeah, [crosstalk 00:31:57]

Ed: Is it because there's more proprietary advances in the chemistry, that are substantive? Or is it, you know, [inaudible 00:32:09] you're talking about something else?

Chris: I think perhaps it's just so easy these days to sort of tweak battery chemistry, and maybe have, you know, we can have hybrid packs, we can have some lithium ion, and we can even have some sodium ion, or we can have some NCM and LFP. I'm getting technical here, but I think it...because it's much easier to do that nowadays, and we are just seeing specialized cells for car makers, you know, if they want high range or they want something that's good in colder temperatures, if it's being sold, you know, in Scandinavia or something. So, I guess, from that perspective, it's just for the car maker, and whether it's a price that's accessible and standardized is really not to the point, but...

Ed: It's interesting.

Chris: I'm sure the market wins out inevitably, and what is cheaper for the producer. And if there is too much, you know, I think you mentioned in your book that at one point there was too much standardization. I think this was in Ford's example. I'm not sure. There was too much customization, and then that sort of all had to be stripped away, so I'm sure there's a balance to be found. But no, [crosstalk 00:33:11]

Ed: Yeah, well, Ford didn't like...Ford wanted standardization. But then in the end, he kind of lost out on that, because, you know, GM basically were the ones who invented the consumer, you know, the consumer, one says this color, therefore they should have that color. And Ford was like, well, every car has to be black. And in the end, I think it was GM that won that battle, rather than Ford. And so, consumers like lots of different crazy funky styles and things.

Chris: Yeah.

Ed: And that makes it quite hard to completely standardize in the end.

Chris: Yeah. I guess in some sense, it's, well, you know, I think car colors are becoming more bland anyway. More grays, blacks, and whites.

Ed: It's true. They're all gray. They're all gray these days.

Chris: So, maybe we're standardizing on those, but anyway, more imponderables for a Monday morning. But I'm conscious of time. I wouldn't wanna keep you for any longer. To our listeners, do head to argusmedia.com for more of our price reporting and journalism. But for now, Ed, thank you very much for your time. Much, much appreciated.

Ed: Thank you, Chris. Appreciate it.