Your spec sheet says 'lithium-ion'. That is not an answer.

We track 229 electric variants for the Australian market. For 104 of them we have recorded a battery chemistry claim taken from the manufacturer’s own Australian brochure or spec page. Twenty-two of those 104 answer the question with the word “lithium-ion”, or some dressed-up version of it like “liquid-cooled Li-ion”.

That is not a chemistry. Every battery in every electric car on sale here is lithium-ion. It is roughly as informative as a restaurant listing “food” on the menu.

Eleven of the twenty-two are Hyundai.

Why the word you are missing is the one that matters

There are two chemistries you actually care about. Lithium iron phosphate, LFP, and nickel manganese cobalt, NMC. The trade is well understood. NMC packs more energy into the same weight, so it buys range. LFP is cheaper, tolerates far more charge cycles, and is happier sitting at a high state of charge.

That last point is the one with a practical consequence, and it is why the missing word costs you something.

If your car has an NMC pack, the standard manufacturer advice is to charge to about 80% for daily use and only fill to 100% before a long trip. Sitting at full charge is what wears an NMC cell. If your car has LFP, the advice inverts. Tesla, for one, publishes guidance that LFP cars should be charged to 100% regularly, partly for cell health and partly because the battery management system needs a full charge to keep its state-of-charge estimate honest.

So the same instruction, “charge it to 80% and it will last longer”, is good advice for one chemistry and mildly bad advice for the other. A buyer who reads “lithium-ion” on the spec sheet has been handed a decision without the information required to make it.

Who tells you, and who does not

BYD names the chemistry on all twenty of the variants we track. Every one is LFP, marketed as the Blade battery, and BYD is not shy about it because the chemistry is a selling point for them.

MG names it on nineteen of twenty-one. Tesla, Volvo, GAC and Geely name it wherever we have captured a spec. These are not all premium brands and they are not all Chinese brands. There is no obvious pattern of who bothers.

Hyundai is the outlier in the other direction. Of the twenty Hyundai variants we track, eleven carry a chemistry claim that is a non-answer: the Ioniq 5, the Ioniq 5 N, the Ioniq 9, the Kona Electric and the Inster all describe the pack as some flavour of “lithium-ion” in Australian material we read on 9 and 10 April. Only the Ioniq 6 gets a real answer, NCM, and that came from a different page.

Kia is stranger still, because Kia disagrees with itself. The EV3 and EV4 brochures say Li-ion NCM. The EV5 brochure says lithium iron phosphate. Then the EV6 and EV9 brochures, from the same brand in the same market in the same model year, say only “Li-ion”. Seven Kia variants land in the non-answer pile. Whatever the editorial standard is at Kia Australia, it is not applied consistently across the range.

Toyota’s bZ4X spec table, dated February 2026, says lithium-ion and stops.

Our own gap, stated plainly

We have a chemistry claim for 104 of 229 variants. For the other 125 we do not.

That is our gap, not necessarily the manufacturers’. It would be convenient to write that BMW, Polestar, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Skoda, Volkswagen and Porsche all refuse to disclose, because we hold no chemistry for any of their variants. We are not going to write that, because we have not yet gone through their Australian material properly, and the honest statement is that we have not looked hard enough rather than that they are hiding.

Filling those 125 is on our list. When it is done we will publish the count again, and if it turns out the European brands are as vague as Hyundai, we will say so with the same names attached.

What to do about it before you sign

Ask, and get it in writing. An email to the dealer asking “is the battery in this specific variant LFP or NMC” is a thirty-second job and the answer determines how you should charge the most expensive component in the car for the next decade.

If nobody will tell you, that is worth something too. Not a reason to walk away, but a small data point about how the brand treats a question with a real answer.

And treat any charging advice you read that does not first ask which chemistry you have as incomplete. That includes most of the advice you will find.

What to watch

LFP is moving upmarket. It used to be the cheap option in the cheap cars, and it is now appearing in mid-range variants from brands that used NMC throughout. Tesla already runs LFP in parts of the range and NMC elsewhere, which means the correct charging advice differs between two cars in the same showroom wearing the same badge.

Once that becomes normal, “charge to 80%” stops working as general advice entirely, and the spec sheets that say “lithium-ion” will be actively unhelpful rather than merely lazy. We will keep counting.

---

Sources and method. Counts are from Cardinkum’s own catalogue: 229 current electric variants for the Australian market, of which 104 carry a battery chemistry claim recorded against a manufacturer source. Each claim in our database stores the source document and the date it was read; the claims cited here were read between 28 March and 10 April 2026, and the Hyundai, Kia and Toyota material specifically on 9 and 10 April 2026. Chemistry values are recorded verbatim as published, then normalised into LFP, NMC or unspecified for counting; “lithium-ion”, “Li-ion” and “liquid-cooled Li-ion” are counted as unspecified. Charging guidance for LFP versus NMC is drawn from manufacturer owner documentation, Tesla’s published charging guidance being the clearest public statement of the LFP case. We have not verified chemistry for 125 of the 229 variants and have said so above rather than counting absence as refusal.