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Comment by wffurr | Hacker News Reader

Physical limitations of batteries vs air oxidized fuel. Dragging around your own oxidizer takes a lot of mass which severely limits power.

The real breakthrough will be a battery that can use atmospheric oxygen, like a zinc-air battery. But it hasn't worked out in the last 100 years and it's not clear if it ever will.

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Batteries appear to be operating on a vastly slower Moore's law at least. They have been sinfully underfunded as a research field historically.

It's not really a "Moore's law" thing at all - it's more that, like every single other technology in history that isn't specifically semiconductors, batteries don't follow an exponential improvement curve. They also evolve slower than many other technologies even on a more typical growth trajectory, because battery chemistry has way less room for easy improvement. There's only a few battery chemistries that could even theoretically offer much better density than lithium-ion, and we've been trying to make them work for a long time.

My bet is on graphene capacitor batteries.

I would bet on biodiesel for long distance highway transport, farm equipment, and other heavy industry; and electric in a bewildering array of form factors for short distance urban transport.

look at industrial metalworking from ~1860-1960 or so. It was close to exponential.

i agree a significant breakthrough in batteries (or other energy sources) is needed.

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