Free transportation for life

"So, you're going to buy half as many cars and you're going to drive for free for the rest of your life. The punch line to all this? We could have been doing it in the '80s or '90s, and we could rush this technology to mass adoption in the next five years if we wanted."

Musk's talk at Oxford, he mentioned that one of the things enabling the current generation of electric vehicles is the latest generation of Li-ion batteries, which have existed only for a few years.

"Oh yeah, EVs have very little moving parts so they will last 2x or 3x as long as normal cars. Perhaps three or four decades or 500k miles."

Do the batteries last that long? (They're about half the price of the car currently.) Last I knew, lithium-ion batteries lose capacity over clock-time. Some types lose capacity less soon than laptop/phone batteries[1], but I didn't quickly find out how much slower, nor what type of battery Tesla is using. (Do you have info?) Maybe we can't even know: lithium-ion batteries were only invented 40 years ago[2], and modern Li-ion chemistry and size much more recently.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#History

The Super charger stations are not solar powered, right? They have solar panels that feed back into the grid in an attempt to make then power neutral.

I hope Tesla comes out with a 25k car. That would be awesome.