The Limiting Factor describes how battery design improvements, assymetric lamination and adding silicon doping can increase the energy density of Tesla 4680 batteries by about 20% over the next two years. Tesla is not competitive with the best high lithium nickel batteries in the world. If Panasonic and other competitors cannot implement the improvements at the same pace then Tesla could pull ahead on energy density.
The major economic impact is making a lot of 4680 batteries. Tesla needs to scale to hundreds of gigawatt hours per year in batteries produced.
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What this tells me is that Tesla is only committed to incremental battery improvements at this stage, due to sunk costs, complacency, and probably Musk’s distractions everywhere else, especially X and politics.
Meanwhile, solid-state, CATL-specific advances (which Tesla should adopt even if means scrapping invested assets), non-lithium options, are adding 20, 30, even 40% range extensions. Chinese EVs will then take advantage of these developments first, often cheaper than today’s lithium options. The Electric Viking does videos on new battery tech almost weekly, too often to include here, but here’s one promising to double current range to 600km: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_p5Oi-wO2k.
He also made a video saying pundit Tony Seba is saynig Musk may no longer be interested in EVs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AcYWY5LpTM
There are all sorts of videos predicting new battery tech: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=battery+technology
Tesla is looking quaint and stuck.