The purpose of this paper is to review the requirement for potentially scarce or hazardous metals used in a wide range of electric vehicle batteries, in order to provide datasets that could be used as a basis for a variety of assessments of electric vehicles and batteries, such as lifecycle assessments (LCA) and material availability assessments. It is an explicit objective to make the calculations and assumptions transparent so that the datasets can easily be recalculated with different assumptions. We investigate the requirement for metals of nine types of batteries: Li-metal(V), Li-ion(Mn, Ni and Co), NaNiCl, NiMH(AB(2) and AB(5)), NiCd and PbA, which contain seven potentially scarce or hazardous metals/group of metals: lithium, nickel, cobalt, vanadium, cadmium, lead and mischmetal (rare-earth elements). We provide datasets for both near-term and improved technology of the requirement for metals per kWh battery as well as per battery electric vehicle. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.