There are two critical gating items for mass adoption. The first is the battery itself. “Nothing else has more leverage to the electric vehicle business than the cost of batteries,” said someone who knows—Tesla’s J. B. Straubel. If one only looks at operating costs, running a car on electricity per mile driven is cheaper than gasoline. But it is much more expensive to store the energy. In an internal combustion car, the energy is stored in the gas tank. In the EV, it is stored in the battery. Costs for batteries dropped significantly—by over 50 percent—between 2015 and 2019 to about $180 per
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