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Comment by mdkdog | Hacker News Reader

It is getting annoying... Everyone has a breakthrough technology... no one has a real battery.

The galaxy brain take on Tesla is that it is just marketing wrapped around the progress that was already happening in batteries. They really actually are cheaper and have much increased energy density relative to 10 and 20 years ago.

> They really actually are cheaper and have much increased energy density relative to 10 and 20 years ago.

But have they implemented any of these 'breakthrough' technologies?

Does lithium-ion itself count? The first practical chemistry was developed in 1979, the first commercial battery was shipped in 1991 and they went pretty mainstream between 2000 and 2005.

That's a long time if you are talking about announcements made today but there's been lots of announcements in between and there is considerably more investment now than 30 years ago.

If we're looking at breakthroughs since 30 years ago, lithium ion definitely counts. But it's pretty much the only example, and there are very severe flaws with lithium ion leaving the space ripe for improvement. Everything since has pretty much been optimization.

Compare the GM EV1 which cost a million dollars to a tesla p100D and I would suppose that many breakthroughs were involved.

That's outside of 20 years old and it didn't use lithium ion at all. Lithium ion was great, but the question is about breakthroughs since.

And MSRP was reportedly $34k.

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