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"Manufacturers are secretive, but analysts say a lithium-ion battery pack costs an average of roughly $500 per kilowatt-hour"

This can not be true. Tesla will sell a 10kWhr pack for $3500 retail, which is $350.

Nissan will sell me a replacement 24kWhr pack for my LEAF for $5500, or $229. Are they losing money on it? Maybe, but I doubt they are losing THAT much.

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The effective cost for Tesla is around $300. There was a paper in Nature Climate Change about it.

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v5/n4/full/nclimate25...

$500/kWH could still be an average cost. Most lithium battery packs are much smaller than Tesla's (think mobile phones) and are probably much more expensive to manufacture on a per kilowatt-hour basis.

Which kind of average? Tesla manufactures a majority of car batteries -- by capacity, not by count. It's not interesting to conflate mobile phone batteries with car batteries. The article is clearly talking about cars.

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