Batteries all the way down

The post annotates one chart of Chinese cell prices. Lubershane converts them into something familiar: they imply pack prices that put a car’s battery roughly level with a high quality engine, which he calls a real milestone. Two consequences follow and point opposite ways. Competing storage technologies now have to beat that number, so they should be worried unless they are playing a different game entirely. But this is a Chinese price. Cells made elsewhere still sell for about double, so manufacturing outside China cannot compete globally without heavy subsidies and tariffs. The chart credits most of the fall to genuinely lower production cost, yet he suspects Chinese industrial policy is doing more of the work than even good analysts can see, which makes the trend harder to bank on outside China as geopolitical tension ratchets up.