IIRC, the reason sodium batteries would be better is we have abundant stocks of sodium, whereas the raw materials for most other batteries are limited and require more destructive mining. John Oliver just covered some of this on his show last Sunday. If that tech can be improved, hopefully there won't be any deep sea mining for more raw materials!

Sodium batteries are cheaper and less volatile I believe but they're also much less energy dense meaning you need a heavier pack to get a similar amount of range (which also reduces range from the extra weight). I think they're better suited for stationary applications like solar banks and other energy storage solutions.

Thanks for providing these details.

I guess Tesla really has nothing going for them now, other than investors want to get their money back and so the MSM isn’t going to portray the truth.

Really dubious on the sodium ion batteries. Last I saw there were still issues with the technology, primarily battery life. Unless there were some breakthroughs thay went under the radar.

EV batteries are actually significantly different than the batteries in your laptop or phone, and are designed to have minimal degradation over many many years of use. The coolant loops also help to moderate the temperature between cells, which eliminates problems of hot spots and the heat stress that a phone battery will experience.

For instance, my car has over 300 battery cells in it, which results in say a 100 MI Drive will only use each cell draining by about 1/3. The much lower cyclic rate on these cells results in a much longer lifespan, and the battery conditioning using liquid coolant is how they achieve that.