You Can’t Sell a Car That Looks Like Crap 182
ately shuts down and disconnects the power system. “We
had to think about all different types of crash scenarios,”
Straubel said. “So there’s really a lot of what-if type of
engineering.”^347
So to avoid peak oil, we just need to replace our
gasoline vehicles with vehicles powered by lithium-ion
batteries. But isn’t there a peak lithium like there’s a peak
oil? It’s true that the supply of lithium is not endless, but
if the price of lithium increases, then it will be profitable
to extract lithium from sea water. According to research,
there are 230 billion tonnes of lithium available in the
sea. “There’s a lot of lithium in the world,” Straubel said.
“Lithium gets talked about as the resource constraint in
many cases, but there’s surprisingly small amounts of
lithium in a lithium-ion battery. We are more concerned
about nickel and cobalt.”^426
A battery pack in a Roadster will last for 100 000 miles
[161 000 km] or seven years. After this time or distance,
Tesla expects the battery pack will retain approximately
65 percent of its ability to hold the initial charge.^382 It’s
currently expensive to replace the batteries, but Tesla be-
lieves the price of the new batteries will decrease due to
technological progress. “Technology in these batteries is
constantly improving,” Straubel said. “It’s a pretty exciting
thing from a car point of view. Lithium-ion batteries are
getting better by maybe seven or eight percent every year.
A little bit more energy and range, and also the cost is
improving. So, it’s a very exciting time.” Electric vehicles
ten years from now may thus have twice the range of today,