No, not at all. The battery in the article is still 30 times less energy dense by weight as jet fuel. And 10x less by volume. You’ll see synthetic sustainable biofuels and hydrogen way before batteries are in the sky.
95%+ of the energy in a battery directly converts to work. A typical jet engine is about 35% efficient. So the gap is smaller than it looks. More like 10X by weight and 3-4X by volume. Electric planes can regeneratively descend so that makes it a little better still.
Still this is why I said short to medium haul not long haul. But that’s more than half of aviation.
Batteries are already in the sky for commercial operation. So they're already viable for very short haul flights by existence proof. New battery tech just makes them more viable.
It wasn't much of a fight. We're not oriented towards this type of research and this type of tech. When it comes to software and chip design, we're ok. When it comes to the physical world, we're far behind and we're not keenly interested in catching up.
Oh but you are interested, especially now. You are trying so very hard. That is why you are still throwing cash into the dumpster fire that is Tesla. You got blindsided. You exploited the cheap Chinese labour, thinking they can never be as smart as you. Your designs will forever be Greek to them. And that was your fatal flaw, and will continue to be as long as you refuse to admit your shortcomings.
America is the undisputed King of software. That is subject to change, especially with your tech leaders pushing hard to create a technocracy. You have successfully spooked your greatest ally, Europe into building for themselves and they already have a lot in place. Good for them.
The US is even losing software ground with your own people who trust your less and less (scandal after scandal will do that)
What you are left with is selling your software to the Third World, but that is not very lucrative, obviously.
As far as chips are concerned ,I pessimistically give it 5 years for China to equal you in that space. They will not be buying from you anymore, and they have football fields of the smartest people now, in all major field. And they are united in the fact that you don't want to share your toys, so they will use their number one manufacturing and research capacity to upend you.
I don't know what you see, but what I see is that we are not interested in competing with China. I don't listen to CEOs or politicians. I just look at where real developers and engineers spend their time and where investment is going.
It's not a fight we're up for and not one we can win anyway. It's not because of arrogance, stupidity or laziness. Every empire collapses eventually. China will too one day.
The top players in the space (AMD, Nvidia, Intel, Qualcomm, ...) all design their chips in the US and Europe, using software also written in the west. "Only" the manufacturing is outsourced.