It’s meaningless to have the right investment thesis if your timing is bad. No one learned this lesson more in 2020 than all the sad sacks who shorted Tesla…

“There are two bottlenecks that limit their practicality,” says Venkat Viswanathan, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who is leading a team of battery researchers. “We cannot recharge them well enough today, and the other one is that we cannot get all of the capacity, we cannot get a large amount of the energy out.”

Sadly, there’s no battery equivalent of Moore’s Law, the 1965 observation of Intel INTC, +2.13% co-founder Gordon Moore that processing power in an integrated circuit doubles every two years. Making batteries more efficient, powerful and longer-lasting is the holy grail of the electric vehicle industry, yet for all the progress that has been made, Viswanathan talks of major breakthroughs “in maybe five to 10 years.”
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