In the 1920s Henry Ford set up rubber plantations in the Amazon, a steel mill in Michigan and coal mines across the US to supply his growing automotive empire. A century later, car groups are again looking to take greater control of their raw material supply chains in the race to electrify the global car fleet.

Demand for electric cars is taking off but the bottleneck of raw materials for batteries such as lithium, nickel and cobalt is threatening to slam the brakes on their rollout — a problem that could lead to factory shutdowns and land carmakers with billion-dollar fines for missing emissions targets.

“We’re absolutely convinced that this is a race, a zero-sum game and resources are a finite limit,” Tanya Skilton, director of purchasing for electric vehicle critical materials at General Motors, told the FT Mining Summit last month.