Australia is the world's leading lithium producer. Why don't we make electric vehicles?

Australia imports about one million cars per year, worth over $13 billion. (Getty Images: Guang Niu)

In the early '90s, as the Australian car-making industry was getting sucked into its death spiral, a tin mine in Western Australia found itself with an abundance of a low-value mineral: lithium.

"We realised we had a hell of a lot of lithium and didn't have much to do with it," recalls Mike King, who was the mining manager at the Greenbushes mine at the time.