You Can’t Sell a Car That Looks Like Crap 180
not available actually, you couldn’t actually buy some,
which is a drawback to putting them in a car, or they
have substantially lower energy density,” Eberhard said.
“Energy density translates to shorter driving range, and
for us driving range is one of the most important factors
for an electric car to be successful.”^200 This was one of
the topics Elon and Eberhard didn’t disagree on. “Lithium-
ion batteries are the most efficient way to store electricity
today, but I suspect we will find that there are even better
technologies down the road,” Elon said.^248
The final battery consisted of 6 831 smaller cells. There
are six to twelve of these cells in a common laptop battery.
Compared with a regular lead-acid car battery, these bat-
teries are lighter and more powerful, and they don’t contain
any hazardous material. You can recycle a laptop battery
in a similar way as a soda can, and Tesla joined a recycling
company that will take care of used batteries. “I wouldn’t
recommend them as a dessert topping, but the Tesla Motors
lithium-ion cells are not classified as hazardous and are
landfill safe,” Elon said. “However, dumping them in the
trash would be throwing money away, since the battery
pack can be sold to recycling companies.”^247
Everyone who has used a laptop knows that the per-
formance of the battery will decrease as time goes by. But
you can’t compare a laptop battery with the battery in
an electric car. The difference between the Roadster and
a laptop is that the laptop wasn’t designed to last several
years. A laptop’s hardware will be obsolete after a few
years, so why would the battery need to last longer? “I