Post #1567064

I won't let it go to my head. I promise. Probably. Anyways tho for an actual opinion: This thread is a bit of a mess and I would caution taking anything being said (except by me, the *absolute authority*) without a large grain of salt - however mostly people aren't contradicting each other, it's just a hugely complex topic that quickly devolves into semantic-adjacent arguments about how we should be comparing battery chemistries (on market / in lab / cross-chemistry) and what degree we should be considering the "soft factors"; things like the number of recharge cycles, robustness of the cells to damage, cost of manufacturing and/or recycling the cells, etc. Sodium batteries are a big deal, and as far as I've seen we're finally at the point where they're starting to become market viable, but they're still a largely unproven technology. Arguing that battery tech hasn't improved in the last decade is obviously wrong, but it's also not wrong to say that there hasn't been any *dramatic* improvement in the technology in the last decade. None of the many "miracle battery tech" announcements that promise to have double-or-better the capacity of lithium chemistries has panned out, we've just been making slow gains across many chemistries and those cumulative 10% improvements to battery life year-over-year are finally starting to add up to where the average consumer can really notice them.