[benjaminjackman]

So it's kind of a virtuous cycle though. First cell phones and laptops drove up demand for energy storage and so battery tech and production efficiency improved and prices fell to the point putting them in cars was kind of sort of economically not insane.

Now cars are driving up demand by another leap of magnitudes since each car requires magnitudes more batteries than a phone. The number of phones and cars people would like to own per capita is well within an order of magnitude though it's probably close.

Eventually this enables storage of solar derived power an again order of magnitude larger application than cars in at first niche applications then eventually it will be broad based.

Because just like the massive overprovisioning of dark fiber in the dotcom boom, one producers start competing in what is in some sense a dollar auction. The momentum of their growth and the people and processes tasked with ensuring that growth will fight to keep growing supply since it is their livelihood and perceived purpose to do so (both to grow the capacity and to justify that growth, those that don't justify won't be as likely to do the growth and will be selected against).

This will lead to a massive amount of batteries being produced since there doesn't seem to be any supply limits beyond how many mines we can make (and then ocean water than can be filtered for lithium from what I have read). I therefore think that "the cars are only 1/2 as polluting and thus pointless" statement lacks vision and an understanding of the positive externalities of growing electric cars.

The spin off tech is great. ICE cars have played that out. What was their most recent spinoffs? Tar sands / fracking? I guess we got a lot of cheap natural gas which was a step forward and what's really crushing coal. But if we get another oil spike I don't see the money flowing to oil just a much more agressive push towards EVs and battery tech.