The core insight for me was when Musk talked about how little the cost of Li mattered in the unit economics of Li batteries. It was something like 3% of the cost. The rest of it was mostly manufacturing costs. With so much room for improvements at scale and so many potential applications, it seemed like a sure winner.
That's a very useful insight. My "aha" moment came during a lecture given by DARPA at PARC about 5 years ago, outlining how wasteful current battery technology is in terms of density entirely because of safety requirements. They had at the time over a dozen different research projects on ways to improve density by changing how safety is achieved. It is only a matter of time until some of them get to market, and in fact I believe one of them has. They were all 2x-10x improvements.
There’s a kind of Moore’s law in batteries, but the multiplier looks more like inflation than 2x.
Any tech that falls outside of the growth curve seems to run into issues with production or cost that delay it until it fits under the curve. Something cheaper and easier gets picked first.
The first modern EVs had lead acid batteries. More sophisticated than your starter battery, sure, but lead acid all the same. Which is why Tesla was a big deal. We talked about LiPo for something like fifteen years before it showed up in consumer electronics, and then they started catching on fire.
All of this stuff is painfully slow. The big story in EVs is how crazy efficient the motors can get. A company I used to follow (whose name is escaping me now) had a motor that was 95% efficient in its sweet spot. They had scaled up the design to 100 HP.
Yeah electric motor efficiency is awesome. Back in 2005 I had a film-canister sized motor capable of 300W at 90% efficiency, and magnets and motor design have just improved since then.
Not only does materials overall matter little, but Lithium is also super cheap compared to the other materials in the batteries. There's a lot more of Nickel in a Li-Ion battery and it's much more expensive per volume and weight as well.
The batteries would be called Nickel-Carbon or something like that rather than Lithium-anything, if they were named by the amounts or costs of materials in them.
