Affect like how? As of today they're useless, except for Tesla who's motivating car automakers to go towards autonomous cars - but they had the tech before.
Ditto with Tesla's cars; they aren't a drop-in replacement for gasoline cars in all scenarios but I've heard more than one Tesla owner say that they will never buy a gas-powered car again. So obviously that implies greater utility for the person in question than any current gas-powered car.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Powerwall
I don't know if those were still pilot program devices or if they've hit some level of regular production. 2500 units is still a good start.
The good news is that batteries are getting about 8% more efficient every year (price per kwh) [2]. So 10 years from now batteries will be 1.08^10 = ~2.15x as efficient [3].
So when you replace them, they'll cost half as much for the same amount of energy storage (and probably half the space too). It's basically Moore's law for batteries except slower.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/powerwall
[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2015/03/26/ev-battery-costs-alread...
[3] or is it 1/(.92^10)? That would be 2.3x
I'm pleased Elon gets this, but it's a chilling thought. We don't have to have MORE stuff, internets, communications etc. just because of Moore's Law, just because it's possible. We can also have progressively less because it's in someone's interest for it to be less.
This is enough, no?
The same with Space-X...
My point was that his ideas are ones that have potential for huge amounts of change. Whether or not we will see that change is another matter.