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Originally Posted by despacito
You've got it backwards.
Innovation (R&D) goes where business wants it to go. It's that simple.
No it's not, or the ancient Romans would have machine guns for their armies and refrigerators for their housewives and secure radios for their generals. And people in 1950 would have computers made of transistors rather than house-filling vacuum tubes and could have built their AI.
Simple question. The transistor was invented in 1947, yet it took 60 years to make a transistor count sufficient to run the first iPhone. Why did it take that long? Businesses and government had thrown vast resources at computing power for both business and military purposes. Yet it took 60 years. Why?
The same is true for batteries - vast improvements across a broad range of industries and basic molecular level understanding were required before we could make a battery that could power even an iPhone reliably.
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You make the mistake of approaching it as an inevitable and ineluctable process, as if business sits around waiting for scientists to figure it out (don't feel bad, this is a common mistake made by stupid, ineffectual people).
I haven't made any mistakes on this topic, you're just an utter ****** who understands absolutely nothing about the world or engineering, which is why you've said stupid stuff like "Musk is putting solar panels on his superchargers and unplugging from the grid". If you weren't incredibly ignorant, you'd know this was impossible, for example.
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The reality is business objectives drive the direction and pace of R&D. It's nuanced and there are decisions and discretion every step of the way. But that's the rough idea.
The world just doesn't work like that. Improving hard basic tech (like batteries, transistor miniaturization, solar cell power output, pixels on a screen, etc) has taken half a century or more each to reach commercial viability. And battery tech has been slower than most despite massive demand - it's just the nature of the medium, trying to chip away at halting the chaotic processes of basic entropy at a tiny molecular level you couldn't even see in 1950 let alone 1900, and even once we could see, took another 40 years to get an energy density that can run a car at even remotely viable economics.
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You're doing all of the following:- overstating the conditions precedent to ANY battery (not specifically Li-on)
- underestimating the potential of large scale capital intensive efforts
- underestimating the potential for discovery by small groups of pioneers
- ignoring various possible scenarios and focusing on ONE only
- copy/pasting a high school textbook (to borrow your expression, like a "cuck")
I'm not doing any of these things...you're just such an facile dope that you doesn't realize that we've already run this experiment. Batteries have been extensively tried over and over and over again for a century and the pace of progress we have is the best we can do. Cars aren't the only consumers of batteries and in fact are a fraction even today - batteries have been a huge industry for decades, and currently worth over $100 billion/year. It's not like there aren't vast and diverse research efforts at making them better, because even small improvements are worth a fortune.
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Imagine the US went all in on batteries instead of the Manhattan Project.
The Manhattan project was orders of magnitude easier than shrinking transistors or making batteries better.
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You're not capable of doing any of this but at least scratch the surface, wake up, and smell the Li-on inferno that is toasting your marshmellow.
You're not even capable of seeing the surface, your head is so far up your ass on a 10-year-old's take on philosophy (Anything is Possible therefore you can't discount my wild assertions!) that you can't see how reality actually works.