“... produced a structural battery that performs ten times better than all previous versions”The Fastest Sports car! [1]
[1] with a 3.2-liter horizontally opposed flat 6-cylinder engine
But then that's not what it is about. The breakthrough is (oversimplifying here) that they invented a way to whack a bog-standard smartphone battery into the middle of a bunch of layers of building material, such that about 20% of the weight of the end product is battery, whilst the material is still strong enough to not cause a Samsung Galaxy Note style oopsie when structurally compromised, and to be strong enough to build with, and to have some of the mass of the battery improve the structural integrity of the whole, even.
The idea being: Take your tesla. Take the batteries out. Smash em to paste. Remove ~20% of the atoms from the chassis materials and replace them with your paste.
Voila - made your car 20% lighter.
I think there might be lots more low hanging fruit, their cars weigh quite a bit.
"The battery has an energy density of 24 Wh/kg, meaning approximately 20 percent capacity compared to comparable lithium-ion batteries currently available. But since the weight of the vehicles can be greatly reduced, less energy will be required to drive an electric car, for example"
"the researchers did not choose the materials to try and break records – rather, they wanted to investigate and understand the effects of material architecture and separator thickness." - this implies there may be a lot of room for improvement with this design.