Abstract: Research on China's lithium consumption of new energy vehicles and its future changes is not only the premise of scientific management of lithium, a key emerging mineral, but also of great significance to ensure the healthy development of the new energy vehicle industry.In this paper, the bottom-up and top-down calculation ideas are adopted to calculate the lithium consumption of new energy vehicles based on the measurement results of unit vehicle storage and unit storage of lithium consumption.The results show that lithium battery production technology continues to improve, lithium consumption per unit storage capacity of lithium batteries decreased from 0.166 2 kg/(kW·h) in 2014 to 0.146 3 kg/(kW·h) in 2019.China's lithium consumption of new energy vehicles is about 8 740 t in 2019, the cumulative lithium consumption of new energy vehicles from 2012 to 2019 is 31 500 t, the consumption of pure electric passenger cars, buses and special vehicles accounted for 48%, 33% and 13% of the cumulative total respectively.Lithium consumption structure of new energy vehicles has changed significantly, lithium consumption of pure electric passenger cars has exceeded that of pure electric buses, lithium consumption of ternary material batteries in the field of new energy vehicles has exceeded that of lithium iron phosphate batteries.