this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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Technology
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Battery breakthroughs are announced every day. Very few make it to market.
Yet the batteries on the market keep getting better
combustion engines get better every year too. Engineers love optimizing what's already there.
A breakthrough by it's nature isn't just a marginal improvement.
A breakthrough often enables more than just a marginal improvement in theory. However building real world, mass produceable products based on the science is not an instant process, and very commonly manifest as a trickle rather than all at once.
LED lighting has changed the world, when they first came out in 1962 as faint ir emitting devices, they were quite useless for most of the purposes we know them for today.
They are improving a few percent every other year, but never in big jumps like these headlines would suggest
That's not true, "regular" Li-ion batteries have become tremendously cheaper and have increased their capacity by a lot in the past decade. The next jump in their capacity is about 50% more again, and it's already being previewed by the big battery manufacturers. They're not going to be cheap though.
I don't think they're discounting the excitement, but keeping realistic expectations. Don't hold off on buying an EV or hybrid if you're in the market right now because headlines say they just discovered this. The path from lab to the dealership is long and sometimes fruitless