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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

But still, electric cars work, and work well. I have an EV with over 400 miles of range. It may be heavy but that doesn't affect me much in my day-to-day.

But electric propulsion really doesn't work well for tons of air travel cases, and a battery like this really would be transformative for those uses - that's how I interpreted GP's comment.

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Sure, it works, but their point is that the savings would be near exponential. Eg, a battery with similar characteristics but double the density might allow you to reduce the size of the battery by something like 70% while keeping the same amount of range. So the amount of resources required is greatly reduced. Considering it's only a matter of years before ICEs are flat out banned in most countries, figuring out more efficient ways to use resources for vehicles is pretty important.

With electric cars you're mostly looking at a cost curve at this point. The cars have proven they're competitive in a range of market segments and that advantage will be built out in the coming years, either from optimising the current battery tech or inventing new stuff. This is true for most overland transportation as we're also seeing batteries in trucks, trains, busses and trams.

This is not true for planes and helicopters yet. We're still not at the point where the planes carrying the bulk of passengers (100-200 seats, 1000-4000 km) can be electrified, even with no budget constraints. We're starting to see concepts for smaller planes and that's obviously a good start but there's still some ways to go – better batteries could make a big difference here as it might allow electrification of planes that wouldn't previously been possible. After that we obviously still need to get the costs down, but that generally comes with scaling.

>I have an EV with over 400 miles of range.

Which one? What is your actual overall average Wh/mile vs. your car’s rated efficiency?

I own a Model S Plaid. Its rated range is nominally 396 miles, but that’s never gonna happen in real life. (No one buys a Plaid to drive in Chill mode…)

Curious. Why a Model S Plaid?

Sure, it’s a rocketship in a straight line, but there are reportedly lots of other cars (even electric ones) that are much more fun to drive on a twisty road.

Because its performance is unparalleled. Also, it’s tons of fun to drive on twisty roads.

I don’t know of any other production car that offers comparable performance. Every other Tesla feels slow in comparison. I have driven the Lucid Air Grand Touring. Its performance isn’t remotely comparable, and the Lucid Sapphire is currently vaporware. As of mid-January, only three existed on the planet, and none of those were available to the public.

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