Month: August 2022

The Ioniq 5 electric crossover has sold out again, with the latest drop of units from Hyundai’s Australian division gone in a matter of minutes.

Hyundai announced last week that it would make an additional 135 vehicles available on Wednesday, continuing the “drip feed” release of the popular EV, which has won multiple car of the year awards around the world.

The latest tranche included, for the first time, the newly named AWD Techniq with optional sunroof, which was originally a standard feature but was then removed amid rising costs and differentiation of the pricing from the RWD Dynamiq.

Interest in the Ioniq 5 is clearly not slowing down.

In addition to being awarded the title for its superior stability when towing, the vehicle’s telematics system also allows drivers to set tow weights before driving off to get a highly accurate range estimate.

Add to that the addition of internal as well as external vehicle-to-load capabilities, and the Ioniq 5 does in deed shape up to be a vehicle that probably won’t “ruin your weekend.”

However, it may have ruined some people’s mid-week.

This time, readers tell The Driven than the latest tranche may have sold out almost almost immediately.

“Put my postcode in for the Ioniq 5 raffle at one second past Zero hour and got a message saying the cars were sold out. This is crazy!” one reader said in a note to the Driven.

Similar messages were shared on social media: “I just missed out on an Ioniq 5. I was in there on the dot at 1pm and got kicked out multiple times. I had just entered my credit card and hit the pay button and then it told me it had sold out,” said one hopeful buyer on Facebook.

A spokesperson for Hyundai Australia tells The Driven that each tranche is divided into pre-allocations by capital city (no cars are yet available for regional areas,) and that the latest tranche sold out by 1:16pm, with the first payment being taken at 1:06 p.m.

There is one faint light at the end of the tunnel for drivers wanting to get their hands on an Ioniq 5 though: as reported by Riz Akhtar, secondhand prices are starting to come down as more new cars are made available to customers.

Mind you, the “near new” asking price for an Ioniq 5 still sits well above the price of a new one.

Bridie Schmidt is associate editor for The Driven, sister site of Renew Economy. She has been writing about electric vehicles since 2018, and has a keen interest in the role that zero-emissions transport has to play in sustainability. She has participated in podcasts such as Download This Show with Marc Fennell and Shirtloads of Science with Karl Kruszelnicki and is co-organizer of the Northern Rivers Electric Vehicle Forum. Bridie also owns a Tesla Model 3 and has it available for hire on evee.com.au.

As the transition towards renewable energy continues to inch forward day by day, perhaps the most abundant thematic – electric vehicles (EVs) – is leading the charge.

Lithium (and arguably, nickel and cobalt) is typically considered the darling child(ren) of the battery metals segment. However, one often-overlooked segment has opened up a compelling value proposition.

Rare earths, which, coincidentally, aren’t all that rare (in the ground anyway), have garnered attraction lately.

The group is comprised of 17 metals that are essential to technological functions in society.

Rare earths ASX mining shares open a compelling proposition

According to Dr Kingsley Jones, analyst at Jevons Global Investment Advisory, “[t]he EV market thematic is driving higher demand for rare earth metals”.

In a recent note, Jones covers the market for rare earths. In it he builds a core basket of portfolio companies to gain exposure to the space.

He said that demand has accelerated for the basket of rare earths within ASX mining shares. This is due to their use in high-performance magnets used in electric motors and generators.

In particular, the “rapid uptake of EVs and the very large generators used in wind turbines to provide renewable energy” has underpinned the demand.

Aside from that, China refines and produces more than 60% of the world’s unprocessed rare earth oxides.

Not to mention, rare earths are notoriously hard to extract anyway. The reason? “Host minerals are difficult to process and the rare earths are hard to separate,” Jones says.

With that, the analyst and his employer suggest five companies for investors to hone in on for exposure to rare earths from mine to metal, all the way downstream.

These include Arafura Resources Limited (ASX: ARU), Hastings Technology Metals Ltd (ASX: HAS) and Australian Strategic Materials Ltd (ASX: ASM). I’ve covered the other two here.

This basket of stocks provides a diversified offering of names with exposure to rare earths at different points along the value chain, Jones says.

Take a look at the returns for each of these shares for the past 12 months on the chart below.