Yeah yeah.
BOM of modern phones is typically around 1/3 or less of the sale price.
"economies of scale" regardless, they could have put working solid state batteries in every flagship three years ago and still made 50-70% profit margins, but then why would you upgrade?
The batteries are the only consumable parts left on modern electronics (besides maybe the OLED screen, but that's a five+ year issue that's been steadily improving for years), and soon to be the reason why EV's need replacing every 5-10 years. They don't have the mechanical wear/tear of ICE cars but manufacturers need to find ways to get consumers to replace their hardware every few years.
Nevertheless, companies like Tesla build huge factories to pump out inherently flawed EV batteries that have a limited usability life, and whose short range will only get ever shorter with time and temperature.
Look up the cost of non warranty battery replacements for EVs, and tell me this isn't the next cash cow for manufacturers.
What's more, since parts these days are typically serialized and coded to work with paired computers, you won't be able to do these repairs yourself.
I.e. swapping components from identical brand new iPhones or other smartphones, will lead to them becoming dysfunctional or completely non functional.
I guarantee you, when solid state/ceramic batteries come to market in volume, they will either be: ultra premium low volume in cars such as the Lucid Air, or gimped in some way to force maintenance/replacement after a set period of time, or be cost cut in capacity compared to their conventional alternatives, so the advantages are limited to safety, and small solid state cells are used in place of larger conventional arrays, rendering the increased longevity and density irrelevant due to increased load per cell.
Good engineering solutions don't make it into the final product unless they are long term profitable for the manufacturer. Nor do patents held for years typically lead to a product, because they only do so if they lead to profit, and better, longer lasting products aren't profitable. Circular economy "recycle" mentality is the latest way to encourage replacing things every 2-3 years.
EU and other governments had to mandate that car parts be available for a certain amount of years, I think seven, because manufacturers would stop selling certain parts, to force people to buy new cars, aftermarket parts wouldn't work unless you reprogrammed the ECU.
My bet is on the microcontroller for the battery failing after x number of years, and being impossible to replace by anyone other than the manufacturer, for "security" reasons. This is already the case with batteries from Apple (if you replace with a non paired, non Apple battery, your phone will lose functionality), and the rest of the industry tends to follow them.
I cannot even begin to ask where you seem to be pulling these assertions from. They seem...less a consistent thought and more a collection of competing conspiracy theories about why things happen.
Let me start with the BoMs only being 1/3 the price of the consumer cost of a thing... Because, wow. How do you even pull that from your hat? Let me logic my way through this.
1) Raw material is extracted...often a 5-15% markup for sale to a manufacturer.
2) Manufacturer refines that raw material into something. Another 5-15% markup traditionally.
3) That something becomes a sub-component, shipped to an assembly plant.
4) The assembly plant builds the final good. Here we start seeing 15-30% of the good being wholesale markup...as they have the potential for complex failure modes and have to account for a lot more losses.
5) The final good is sold wholesale to a vendor, who sends it to the consumer. You generally see 200-300% of the BoM cost here...because it's got to account for retail losses, storage, transportation, and all the other fun.
If you have a problem with this...which is actually closer to 300-400% of actual raw material costs...then you have an issue with capitalism. That's not a fault of batteries.
You...are poorly informed about cars. Full stop. You are also poorly informed about the failure rate of electronics. Let me help you. The average ICE vehicle requires regular maintenance...and so does a Tesla. The average ICE vehicle generally has its shortest maintenance period on braking and other friction based components...which is the same as a Tesla. Regenerative braking is fantastic...until you decide to do the long term math and discover that the huge thermal load on such actually is a killer of electric motors...because physics. Elaborating on that, as materials heat and cool they become brittle over time. The insulation on coils dies, creating shorts, killing motors. Believe it or not, having a motor rewound is potentially very expensive...like as much as a large chunk of those batteries. The other bit you seem to not understand is that capacitors have lifetimes, resistors can overheat, and there are literally hundreds of these components embedded into the framework of the Tesla...so even if you only have a 0.001% failure rate that's 0.999^1000 (for 100 parts), or a 64% failure rate. Kinda seems like good old stupid ICE engines are comparatively great...because reliability through simplicity is pretty baller.
So...let me also suggest that batteries don't die. This will sound like insanity, but there's generally one failure mode. Through excessive heating, the mixture of electrolyte and salts formed as a carrier crystallize into a non-conductive structure. Said structure resists flow, creating heat, converting more of that material into dendritic crystals that stretch from the anode/cathode. This dendritic crystal growth basically saps the battery of power through internal resistance to flow...and it's why we see battery packs off-gas before exploding. The crystals liberate heat, liberating electrolyte, leading to vaporized off-gas, cells expanding, and boom. Did you know that by creating an unstable and rapidly cycling voltage you can use the internal desistance of those crystals to obliterate themselves...effectively rehabbing the battery? The following is for lead acid, but it's the same principal for lithium:
Hackaday - Battery Breaking Sulfur Crystals
The problem is that standard batteries are a bit less explosive when exposed to air...so rehabbing batteries is generally done by stripping the cells, chemically separating the components, and rebuilding the cells. Who would have thought it, nobody in their right mind would pulse lithium chemistries due to the associated energy density?
If you'd like a paranoid theory that isn't paranoid, then you should latch on when people talk about fast charging being a way to limit battery life. You should not latch onto the 5-10 year lifetimes...because if I exposed you to what your battery is expected to endure you'd last that long or less too. Huge temperature cycles, high temperature variability by location, fast charging shenanigans, and rapid charge and discharge cycles brought on by the regenerative braking and the like are great features for the consumer...and basically a requirement that any chemistry will be severely tested.
I'm going to categorize the rest of this largely into silliness with manufacturing and silliness with the market. I'll explain why...but for right now your two salient attacks are that manufacturing is stripping our rights to repair, and that the cost of replacing things is high.
To the former, you can contact a legislator. My two word answer to this is "John Deere." They actually were taken to task when their idiotic locking created a black market for people to have "a friend of a friend" who could come out and reprogram your tractor for a new attachment...or a technician could be out in 3-6 weeks and connect the reprogramming box for the 5 minutes to change the firmware. Of course, a farmer can't wait weeks for harvest times...so they actually lobbied the government for curtailing Deere's constant move to make their goods only serviceable by their techs. Greed sucks but if you want to "fix" the cost of something like having to reprogram your iPhone for a new start button, having to spend a grand to have a tech spend 5 minutes so you can get your physically attached thresher to work with your tractor, or to anything else then you need legislation...because in a mostly service economy it makes sense that you'd be charged the hugely profitable service fees if a company can. Again, this is greed and not a requirement of the batteries.
I choose the later point because you seem to want to focus on money. Let me help you reword this. You attack the economies of scale that would allow adoption, then cite Tesla. That's backwards, because they literally took government money to build standard size lithium cells...that Tesla packages into units for their vehicle. They are literally taking a proven technology and driving down costs with novel packaging (battery groups) and an insane volume of production. Likewise, you cite the NASA battery as probably a halo product...but based upon nothing. Bespoke production would not be effective, but if you think to the next step the real question is how they could scale...and the supply chain involved.
Lithium is affordable because the metal salts are stable, and can be harvested. These are then chemically processed into batteries. Said batteries are one time use...and afterward are currently stored as hazardous waste. Assuming about 7 years of lifespan, that's 10 batteries in your lifetime. This means that if the selenium solution just competed with lithium it could be 10x as expensive if it could last 70 years. That'd also require a way to get the material....which is a non-starter. Lithium in the Earth's crust is about 50,000 atoms per billion, whereas Selenium is 10. Source is here:
Lithium vs Selenium
What this means is that it's not a conspiracy. It's quite simple to say the issue with this new battery is not about economy of scale, but logistics and resources. It's funny though, somehow everybody seems to chalk this up to conspiracy rather than simple abundance of resources...and if you're NASA spending billions to get a rover to Mars another 10k on a novel battery is nothing if you can guarantee specific mission critical performance. I believe the relevant phrase is never attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to ignorance. After reading through another thread, and seeing the same "journalists" claim the same news headlines without a critical thought passing between their ears, I know the truth of this matter. NASA made a great claim to support their science, the public is promised it has value, and their lack of attention spans will bury this along with hundreds of other novel scientific steps (like this one in 2020
Novel battery concept) until someone makes a reasonable discovery.
If it isn't clear, in this lifetime we've already made enough changes to be silly. Lead-Sulfur, NiMh, Lithium Polymer, Lithium Ion, and a bunch of other tech has been made accessible because we demanded more power. It was profitable because the resources are abundant, and the entire industry created itself to scale. If tomorrow you could find a novel chemistry of silicon, carbon, and aluminum it'd be in-production next week. Please note those three elements are the bulk of the composition of earth's crust...so even if the process was dozens of times more expensive than lithium it'd still be preferred because the raw materials would be fractions of the cost of the relatively rare Lithium atoms....let alone the damn near unicorn of selenium. You seem to buy into this partially, but I wanted to make sure that it's clear that there will always be a cost of process, cost of resources, and rarity consideration which trumps and discussion of process scalability...as Tesla already proved an idiot front man with charm can get a surprising amount of tax payer money to address issues.
