[magila]

Eh, not really. Most "battery breakthrough!" press releases are about some new exotic chemistry while most mass produced battery improvements in the last 20 years have come from incremental improvements to existing chemistries and better packaging.

[Schroedingersat]

Hard carbon anodes were one of these "exotic" new elements, but are now just standard.

Silicon anodes will be the same.

Sodium ion still has shills screeching about how it'll never come despite being last year's news.

Lithium Manganese batteries are another one of these exotic chemistries that arrived without fanfare.

[_ea1k]

Meh, the devil's in the details with a lot of those announcements. A surprising number of them are things like... it will be 50% better 5-10 years from now!

That's actually incremental improvement if you think about it in annual improvement terms.

[zamnos]

It is, except for the fact that the future isn't guaranteed, so there could be unforeseen problems with scaling up, and that 50% improvement never gets delivered. As mentioned upthread though, CATL has expertise in that area, and "end of this year" is so a trackable claim, unlike the claims about gallium-based batteries.

[_ea1k]

I agree. Its also not uncommon that the "old" tech improves incrementally during the same timeframe, mitigating the seeming impact.