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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

If a new battery tech like fluoride batteries has much more capacity but is more expensive because it's not produced at scale yet, a solution is to do exactly what Tesla did in the first place: put it first in expensive high-end cars and gradually work down the value chain. It'd be easy to charge a premium for an electric car with a 1500-mile range.

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If a car with 1500-mile range will become a reality with any chemistry, it will not appear first. These (fantastic) batteries with 4-5x the energy density of modern li-ion, will go into a much more profitable use: electric airplanes.

Not sure if these ever appear though. This seems to push not just the limits of technology, but even the laws of physics.

Googling "fluoride battery" brings up a bunch of articles claiming up to 10X better energy density than lithium. Until recently fluoride batteries had to be kept at high temperature but a recent development by Honda/NASA/Caltech changed that [1] [2]. However, "the team still has to figure out how to stabilize the anodes and cathodes, which tend to dissolve completely into the electrolyte. They're making some headway though, and further testing is currently underway."

In any case, I'm not really making any particular claims about battery tech, just saying I see a flaw in the article's argument that lithium is unassailable. I agree that airplanes are a likely early application of radically better batteries.

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/07/fluoride-battery-breakth...

[2] https://www.batterypoweronline.com/news/what-the-fluoride-io...

An airplane usually spends 1-2 hours in the airport between flights. During that period it needs to be recharged.

Or the battery needs to be swapped out with one that was charged while it was in the air.

I guess it would start with niche technologies where the battery is small and expensive. Like extremely miniaturized personal electronics, or drones. Given the cost advantage lithium has due to mass production, it will be more than 10 years until something else can replace them.

I find our interesting that Cobalt mines outside of the Congo aren't being funded. There's a few in Australia and a couple in Namibia in the early stages that don't look like they'll be developed.

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