Wow....7 pages before this became silly.
So...let's talk about some limitation, and why battery technology is limited. Let's also leave the politics at the door, after a good poke at a merchant of stupidity.
Musk, and by extension Tesla, have delivered exactly zero in the way of technological advancements. If you spend all of ten seconds doing high school trig, you'd be able to see that the "new" Tesla cells hold 50% more energy (or whatever he's claiming this week). You'd also see that the dimensions for those cells changed. As in, most humans are bad at doing math, and missed that the "minor" increase to radius meant that the cylindrical cell actually has an internal volume that matches exactly with the increase in total stored energy.
Let's now talk about advancements. Most of the advancements are not about the battery chemistry, they're about changing the electrodes. Has anyone asked why? Well, the logic is that breakdown of lithium chemistry batteries largely occurs at the interface between the electrodes and the energy storage medium. This happens due to crystallization of the ions, and subsequent release of lithium gasses created when the battery charges too fast.
Please note that charging too fast is a problem for creation of gasses the battery has to vent, degrading the chemistry, and most frustratingly the desire of us humans to have these things charged instantly. This is, anecdotally, how in practice NiMH (nickel metal hydride) batteries can last longer than lithium polymer chemistry...despite the ratings and technical data stating the exact opposite. This is how your fast charging iPhone also lasts for a couple of years, but my non-fast charging Samsung smart phone is still at 70% of initial capacity 4 years after purchase. Yeah, I've watched that anecdotally, and it seems like others in this thread are confusing anecdotal results with experimental laboratory data.
Now...about that charge density. Did anyone here actually stay awake in high school chemistry? I'm basically going to assume not... I do that because there's a lot of stupidity in general (from the reporting side). Let's walk through all of this in one shot.
1) The reason diesel trucks run on diesel is that the chemical energy available is the highest density available. They get this distinction because diesel basically doesn't auto-ignite under pressure like octane (gas). Because you can get a huge compression ratio, diesel is capable of turning chemical energy into mechanical energy very easily.
2) The reason that octane (gasoline) is used is that at the compression ratios it can attain it's very easy to combust fully and deliver a ton of energy. The reason our current gas is unleaded, and if you find some old timers or farmers they say it is garbage, is because with tetra-ethyl lead that compression ratio could go much higher (and thus the inherent greater power delivery of gasoline could be realized).
3) The amount of energy in your average AA battery is more than in a rechargeable. Why? Well, in a one-way chemical breakdown the difference in electronegativity can be high. That is, much higher than in a reaction which is meant to be done and undone on a regular basis. This is where that basic high school chemistry comes into play. Imagine for a moment the lemon with a copper and zinc spike driven into it. You don't get to reverse that reaction, but with simply the ability to transfer ions through an electrolyte solution you get a surprising amount of power.
Now, let's talk rechargeable batteries (in the context of current cars). You are literally charging and discharging its battery constantly. How does it work? Well, it's basically lead plates stored into a solution of sulfuric acid. Just like your lithium chemistry, it develops gasseous bubbles on the plates. Unlike Lithium chemistry though, the degredation of the electrodes is much slower because of the amount of cells and sheer volume of them. That said, 14 volts from your alternator is used to overcome the chemistry and allow a 12 volt charge to be delivered.
Lead acid has the benefit of being relatively cheap, relatively resistant to temperature swings, and capable of delivering large amounts of power quickly. Lithium is not so much. You give up all of these conveniences, but in return get a much higher energy density (about 4 times in practice). The problem is that lithium chemistry also requires a charging circuit, to try and minimize all of the costs to using them.
So, what kind of efficiencies are we talking? Let's set lead-acid to a value of 1. That would mean lithium ion represents 4. This then gets silly, because octane is a 300+ value. Does anyone else look at this basic math, and wonder how exactly a semi-truck is supposed to work? If a semi takes three tank refills going coast to coast, and you simply converted all of its current energy storage mass to batteries, you'd basically go from 3 stops to 3*4/300 = 225. Of course that sounds silly...so let's factor in a 15% conversion of energy from gasoline to electro-mechanical potential (losses in the drive train), and it's only 34 stops to get across the US...from the current 3. So we are clear, this is the stupidity that places like Forbes fail to comprehend about basic math and physics.
Now...let's remove all limits on battery tech. Let's say that you could actually get the equivalent 15% electromechanical energy of gasoline directly from a battery. Would you want to do this?
NO!
I'd ask you a simple and stupid question. Have you seen the explosion of a small lithium battery? Great. Now imagine that but 11x bigger. You go from the danger of a hand grenade in your pocket to basically a small pipe bomb...and you'd presumably be dragging that around in the pocket of your pants. Maybe it's acceptable to have that danger...but now imagine that you suddenly had a car that can do 3000 miles on a single charge, so you have to charge it over night once every few months. Great. Now imagine a puncture of that battery, and the subsequent action movie style detonation of the energy as the surrounding environment becomes a crater.
Oh, but Tesla or whomever had these batteries would simply decrease their volume by 91% to have the same power...and that decrease in weight would actually mean the range of electric vehicles would increase along with better performance due to the huge leap in power:weight ratio. Great. Now you've got 91% less components, so any failure means your car is grounded. Right now, Tesla and similar designers actually balance out their batteries such that a certain amount of failures can be tolerated without consumer transparency.
Now...about the quantum, gold, and other battery technologies... Our media sucks at reporting. These are evolutions of the capacitor technology. The quantum battery basically is a proof of concept that you can develop a charging circuit for capacitors that is ultra fast. They haven't demonstrated a technology, only a concept in the lab. The gold nanofilaments are the same thing. Fast charge with an energy density that makes lead-acid seem like a great idea. The hydrogen batteries...imagine the insane volatility of lithium with a dramatically decreased density, and no current storage technology.
What about Toyota's solid state battery? Well, they're looking to commercialize the concept the first half of the 2020s. We are four years out from this...as 2022-2025 is four years. Let's say they have something...because their press releases are less than great. The technology is outlined as bi-polar NiMH. The vehicles they outlined for initial commercialization are basically the cousin of the Geo-Metro. This means their goal is to take a small and lightweight vehicle, plug in an unknown battery tech, and potentially get 300 miles of range out of it. Of course, let's talk manufacturing. It's a minimum of 18-24 months to go from finalized design to manufactured product. It's another 3-4 months to go from production volume to distribution. Top that with another 3 months from production start to full production volume. So...about 30 months from final designed to be able to be purchased. New tech is going to need a testing cycle...so those batteries are going to need to be fabricated in a small batch and tested for about 3 months to get enough testing to cover charge cycles and environmental conditions. Now, in the US we also have testing from the national highway safety institution. That's another 3 months. 30+3+3+1 (assuming the testing units can be small batch fabricated in one month). That's 37/42 months down...as new car models roll out middle of the year (assuming 2026 models would be available in July 2025). This means their battery tech has another 5 months to be finalized...which makes sense if their reports of incorporating these into hybrid (tiny) vehicles. So...the break through tech is incapable of powering a geo, it's got to pay for that with the mass of an additional combustion engine, and its goal is only to decrease charge time without impacting time to replacement.
Do we understand that this is possible without current technology being dramatically improved, and only being iterated on? If not, then I don't understand exactly why any of the battery tech can be described as archaic, as the OP seems to conclude.
Of course...if you could decrease the mass of a car by about 80% everything just works. That'd need aircraft grade aluminum composites, which have existed for literal decades. That could take your battery tech that's at 9% as efficient, and make it viable for vehicles assuming that you also decreased expectations to 75% of the range of a much cheaper combustion engine. Of course, it'd also make sure that an "antique" electric vehicle is impossible. That is to say, cars from the 1920's still exist but any electric vehicle is entirely impossible to maintain because after at most a couple of decades the vehicles themselves would be impossible to service...because the batteries getting replaced account for the majority of the vehicle cost. Ironically enough though, even the most long lived batteries cannot endure extended usage...and the motivation is chemistry. This isn't about tech being slow...it's about the limits of material engineering and physics. Neither of which is something that is capable of being overcome without novel alternative situations.
