Battery breakthrough: Double performance lithium battery that doesn’t catch fire

"I want to expand on this because it is a point so often overlooked with all these "holy shit we just created a new tech that is 10000% better" articles. I'm gonna use a loose analogy to try and explain it.

Say you made a perfect cupcake. It is insanely fucking delicious, and will revolutionize the idea of cupcakes. You spent years researching the art of cupcakes, and now have written down the perfect combination of all cupcake factors to make this divine cupcake. Your milk must come from a special dairy who set aside the .02% of the milk that meets your needs, your flour must come from one certain granary using a special indoor grown grain, the eggs from your own 3 specially bred super pampered chickens. The mixing takes place over eight unique specialized mixing procedures, with varying steps in between. The cupcake paper is made from the wood of an endangered Guatemalan tree (requiring federal clearance to obtain 10 sheets of it) and the baking tray from a steel alloy made by one company in Japan, and it's not reusable. The baking process has been tailored to the unique characteristics of your $20,000 1'x1'x1' oven. It takes 3 hours to bake with precise temperature control and positioning adjustment needed throughout the process. The icing also requires it's own set of unique ingredients and precise procedures. To make one of these cupcakes takes 14 hours and costs $2600. If any corners are cut in the process the whole thing falls apart. But done right it is indeed perfect.

A business man finds out about the cupcake that makes people cry tears of joy. He comes to you and needs you to make 35,000 of them a day to sell for $10 each in order to be profitable. Logistically this is simply impossible. No equipment on earth exists that can follow such precise steps for such large quantities, much less a company capable of making it. Your oven costs 20 grand and can bake one cupcake in 3 hours, you need 5000 in 3 hours. Your ingredients come from sources that produce only a minute fraction of what you would need. Never mind that they are scattered around the country making same day delivery impossible short of having your own air fleet. Or that there are only 3 chickens on earth that produce the right eggs. Or that the rare beetle poop in the icing comes from an entomology professor in Peru. Even if you could do all this you still need to adjust the recipe to account for being handled by machines and conveyors. And packaging. And shipping. Oh and slash the cost by a factor of 260.

Since this is all obviously impossible at the time (and for the foreseeable future), you instead just submit the recipe to a food journal and let cooking magazines and TV shows have a field day with sensational articles about the coming cupcake jesus. You become well known and grant money for your legendary lasagna project pours in. There never was any intention to bring this to market, it was just a proof of concept with the added benefit of getting your name out there. It's up to someone else down the road to pick it up and figure out mass production.

If anything people should get more hyped about advancements in production techniques. That's when you will actually get new shit in your hands."

But if that is still less dense than say, a lead-acid battery, but with double the performance of a li-on/polymer battery, is that not still an improvment?

Solar panels, batteries, cpus, the time of big surprises is gone. Now it’s just people putting in hard work on the next thing that wasn’t quite cost effective enough the last go ‘round.

   A ceramic is a non-metallic solid material comprising an 
   inorganic compound of metal, non-metal or metalloid atoms 
   primarily held in ionic and covalent bonds.

Also, the raspberry pi uses a ceramic heat sink.

While it is brittle, it's also self-healing. When it cracks and exposes the aluminum underneath, a new layer of oxide is plated immediately, as long as the capacitor is charged.

Equipment that's been left powered off for a long time and then turned on can sometimes have caps explode because there's a lot of leakage current from holes in the ceramic until it heals (minutes to hours). Lithium batteries are usually completely ruined if they ever discharge down to zero.

You might be surprised to find out that the best body armor today - NIJ level IV (and similar standards in other countries), the kind that can stop armor-piercing bullets - is made either entirely of ceramic, or (lately) is a ceramic/polyethylene laminate.

Side note: you probably wouldn't expect polyethylene show up in this context either - the one used is ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene, and much like ceramics used, it's pretty different from our "common sense" perception of the material.

As far as fragility of such ceramics, this is a topic that comes up often enough to spawn an obligatory "will it ...?" genre on YouTube. So you can watch something like this, and judge for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSK4U2Poo0k

The 1990s-vintage GM EV1 used lead-acid or NiMH batteries. The earlier generations of Prius used NiMH batteries too. The Tesla Roadster was the first highway-legal serial production EV to use lithium ion batteries. It took 17 years after lithium ion batteries saw first commercial use in small electronic devices (commercial batteries out in 1991, Roadster in 2008). Because, as you say, scaling is hard.

Of course the first Roadsters now seem like old hat and every auto maker is using lithium ion batteries. We're eager for the next, better kind of lithium battery. But just getting autos to use any kind of lithium battery was a big enough change that it deserved the "breakthrough" moniker, IMO.