RE:RE:Interesting article on the future of big oil. No, I am not You can make a battery that lasts for 15-20 years but guess what? The whole car will not last that long so the car goes to a scrap yard, and what happens to the battery? You can try to sell it used but my guess is people will not want to spend money on a battery that has been used for half a million miles. Gold jewelry typically lasts for ever but there is no shortage of people trading in that gold for cash and it gets "recycled" into new brand new products. If the vehicle is in a bad accident and there is damage to the structure of the battery pack, what do we do???
...recycle it. Oil on the other hand cannot be recycled after you refine it into liquid fuels and burn it up, and we are forced to constantly dig or drill for more. While it's true that lithium ion batteries are getting better and better in terms of energy density, shorter recharge times and lowered cost to manufacture, you cannot make a commercially viable battery that will never reach the end of its life. Even if you could, there will always be room for error where an entire batch of batteries was made incorrecrly and posses a threat to the end user, Just ask Samsung about what can go wrong when you pack enourmous amounts of energy into little batteries.