Re: Structural Batteries?!
There's more than one type of Lithium-ion battery.
Tesla uses the kind you know best: it’s called NCA (Lithium Nickel Cobalt Aluminium-oxide) and it’s the same chemistry as your laptop or phone. It is energy-dense (which is why Tesla is able to offer greater range than competitors to date), but it is also dangerous: it has thermal risks on hard charging and discharging, and is highly flammable if mis-handled (e.g., if something were to smash into the battery pack and crush the cells). In every respect except energy density, it is the wrong choice to use in a road vehicle.
Because of the safety issues with NCA, the rest of the EV industry uses NMC (Nickel Manganese Cobalt) chemistry instead. These batteries are less energy dense than NMC but are an order of magnitude safer - especially when mechanically shocked. When Tesla started, NMC was far behind NCA, but the latest generation of NMC has come very close to the energy density of NCA, while retaining the higher safety profile, and it may surpass NCA, simply because more vendors are investing in improving it.
Incidentally, not all Li batteries are fire-risks. The safest Lithium chemistry, Lithium-iron-phostphate (LiFePO4), is nearly impossible to get to catch fire (you could try dousing it in petrol, I guess...), but suffers from much lower energy density than either of the previous two. However, it does not require expensive and ethically-dubious-to-source Cobalt or Nickel, and could easily get below the magic $100/kWh figure for vehicles that are not size or weight-constrained. (LiFePO4 is already used in applications where Lead-acid cells were used that don’t require high current at very low temperatures; in the freezing cold, lead-acid is still king, which is why all EVs still have a lead-acid battery on board)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
