Soaring battery costs fail to cool electric vehicle sales

Buyers around the world are lining up to purchase electric vehicles (EV) this year even with sticker prices surging, flipping the script on a decade and a half of conventional auto industry wisdom that EV sales would break out only after battery costs dropped below a threshold that was always just over the horizon.

This year, EV demand has stayed strong even as the average cost of lithium-ion battery cells soared to an estimated US$160 per kilowatt-hour in the first quarter...