Panasonic shot up more than 9%, the most since 2016, after saying its unit which makes batteries for Tesla at their jointly operated battery plant in Nevada turned profitable in the December quarter, Bloomberg reported.

Elon Musk tweeted on Monday Tesla would soon have over a million connected vehicles worldwide, "orders of magnitude more than everyone else combined".

"While Tesla's valuation baffles, excites, angers, could be a new way of valuing is upon us," Benchmark Mineral Intelligence MD Simon Moores tweeted a short while ago.

"World's collide: cars + energy + tech."

Leading sector experts recently told Mining Journal 2020 would be the year the EV revolution began in earnest, at least in Europe.

Producers are no doubt hoping the uptick in sentiment surrounding the EV thematic translates into higher prices, with Australia-based Argentine lithium brine producer Orocobre (ASX: ORE) saying last week the average price received during the December quarter was down 24% QoQ due to continued market softness.

Western Australian hard rock lithium producer Pilbara Minerals (ASX: PLS) had also noted weak demand in its latest quarterly, which it said was impacting both spodumene exports from WA and continuing to reduce pricing across the entire lithium raw materials and chemicals product suite.

Both companies were rising in lunchtime trade on the ASX, with Orocobre up 13% and Pilbara Minerals about 11% higher at the time of writing.

Chile-focused Sociedad Química y Minera (NYSE: SQM) had gained 8.8% yesterday, leading producer Albemarle (NYSE: ALB) rose 11.9% and FMC's 2019 lithium spin-out Livent (NYSE: LTHM) closed up 17.65%.