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Battered by batteries

 The in thing in case you lived in rural Pennsylvania is electric.  As in electric mobility or battery operated cars and trucks or EV, short for Electric Vehicle.  As in I am never paying for gasoline again.  I am hip and I am green et al.

To that end a business upstart created by a dude from South Africa took the EV business and turned it on its head.  Where no one thought this experiment would work he created some fancy automobiles that are the epitome of minimalist when you look at the interface between the vehicle and the passenger, and can operate after plugging into a 110 V outlet in your home.

The product was branded after the famed inventor Nikola Tesla.  To be clear there are two upstarts one successful by Wall Street standards called Tesla.  That is the one that everyone in my neighborhood seems to like and then there is the truck maker called Nikola which is actually facing some heat from the same Street.

Go figure.

Nikola for his part is probably turning in his grave.  If he has one.  Wonder if his ancestors get royalties?  But I digress.  There is this pesky question of what powers these so called EV.  Ah that would be the batteries.  Rechargeable and powerful.  Light enough to stack under the belly of a Tesla and deliver power instantly and seamlessly to the occupants to get them from point A to point B.

In a recent WSJ article the author proclaimed -  

Battery cost and driving range remain issues for drivers thinking of making the switch to an electric vehicle.

Duh!  It takes the WSJ or Harvard these days for average Americans to believe what they could have figured out if say they applied their brain for seven minutes.  But no that is not cool.  We need those minutes to tap on TikTok or some other inane distraction that can allow any douche bag to attract other similarly crafted bags to witness their unique doucheness.

So anyway it is no surprise that there are now things called Battery Days.  When people do not come to see another human beat another up (police define it as battery derived from battering or beating of one by another) literally in some sort of medieval gladiatorama but to actually gawk at and talk batteries.  The very same that power these EVs.

Tech has been evolving rapidly and the winner will be one who can pack the most juice in a similarly weighted combination of nickel, lithium and whatnot so it solves for the power and range to weight ratio in favor of the consumer.  And all this while making it affordable to buy these batteries.  So when you think about it the battle royale for EV dominance is not so much about the vehicle or fancy words like clean mobility yada yada but about who has the best affordable batteries.

LOL.  I remember the Sony Walkman (for the ignoramus in the crowd it is the quintessential breakthrough tech of the 1980s  when Sony of Japan introduced a mobile audio cassette player that you could actually hang in your jeans and go off) was an amazing piece of engineering but I could not afford the batteries to keep it going. 


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