Supply chain challenges (lithium, cobalt) in EV Technology - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Understanding Supply Chain Challenges for Lithium and Cobalt

📖 Scenario: You are working in a team developing electric vehicles (EVs). To build EV batteries, you need to understand the supply chain challenges of key materials like lithium and cobalt.Knowing these challenges helps your team plan better and find solutions to avoid delays or shortages.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple data structure that lists lithium and cobalt supply details, add a threshold for critical supply risk, identify which materials face supply challenges, and finalize a summary report.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary with exact entries for lithium and cobalt supply data

Add a threshold variable to mark critical supply risk

Use a loop to find materials with supply risk above the threshold

Complete the summary report with the identified risky materials

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Understanding supply chain challenges helps EV manufacturers plan for material shortages and find alternative sources.

💼 Career

Supply chain analysts and EV engineers use this knowledge to ensure steady battery production and avoid costly delays.

1

Create the supply data dictionary

Create a dictionary called supply_data with these exact entries: 'lithium': 85 and 'cobalt': 70. These numbers represent supply reliability percentages.

EV Technology

# Create the supply_data dictionary with lithium and cobalt supply reliability
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces to create a dictionary with keys 'lithium' and 'cobalt' and their supply reliability values.

2

Add a supply risk threshold

Add a variable called risk_threshold and set it to 75. This will mark supply reliability below 75% as risky.

EV Technology

supply_data = {'lithium': 85, 'cobalt': 70}
# Add the risk_threshold variable below
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just create a variable named risk_threshold and assign it the value 75.

3

Identify materials with supply risk

Create a list called risky_materials that contains the names of materials from supply_data whose supply reliability is less than risk_threshold. Use a for loop with variables material and reliability to iterate over supply_data.items().

EV Technology

supply_data = {'lithium': 85, 'cobalt': 70}
risk_threshold = 75
# Create the risky_materials list using a for loop below
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Start with an empty list. Loop through supply_data items. If reliability is less than risk_threshold, add the material to the list.

4

Complete the supply risk summary

Create a string variable called summary that says: 'Materials with supply risk: ' followed by the names in risky_materials joined by a comma and a space.

EV Technology

supply_data = {'lithium': 85, 'cobalt': 70}
risk_threshold = 75
risky_materials = []
for material, reliability in supply_data.items():
    if reliability < risk_threshold:
        risky_materials.append(material)
# Create the summary string below
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the join method to combine the risky_materials list into a string separated by commas.