Put a wrap-around chrome bumper on the front of that thing and it looks amazing similar to a '63 XKE Roadster.
BMW and Toyota are working together on these batteries. Expected for 2020... The other interesting news is that the Mercedes-Benz eCitaro is now available for order also with new 441 kWh solid-state batteries. The solid-state batteries supplied by Bollore’s Blue Solution were announced in 2018. Those are the batteries known also as Lithium Metal Polymer (LMP), which are however required to operate at a high temperature of 60-80°C.
This thread needs a dose of reality: 1. All substitutes for oil as a transport fuel are inferior. 2. CO2 emissions are the single best thing that man is doing for the biosphere. More CO2 is better and less is worse. 3. Oil is finite. Perhaps we will produce some for plastics, etc., for a long time to come, but as a fuel source, its days are numbered. Fracking is the only thing that has allowed global production to rise since conventional oil production plateaued in 2006. It will be a dark day when the fracked fields go into decline, around 2025 according to geologists. 4. US coal production is likely to peak around 2035 (regardless of price), and global coal production a little earlier. North American natural gas desperately needs prices to at least double, but even then production will begin to fall sooner than most laymen expect. Global gas (it's actually a regional fuel, since LNG capabilities are bottlenecked) will peak somewhat later, but not in the remote future. 5. Global uranium production will go into decline before 2030 according to multiple forecasts, but there is some dispute whether there are only a few rich deposits, or whether the distribution of uranium deposits follows a bell curve so that smaller but still viable concentrations of uranium remain to be found. 6. US gave up on thorium in the 1960's; India, with its large thorium deposits, has continued research since the 1970's, and China has been investing in thorium research for a number of years. It seems to be largely a matter of developing the right reactor technology, but so far no one has been able to produce a reactor that will produce power from thorium in a commercially viable manner. 7. hydo-electric: not truly renewable, and it lacks scalability. 8. Solar and wind: several problems with these, but the single biggest killer is EROI or Energy Returned On [Energy] Invested. To maintain some semblance of life as we know it, the EROI of our total energy production needs to be at least 8. Below that, our civilization will be in dire straits. If we get down to an EROI of 2, that is the EROI of subsistence agriculture. Solar is about 6; I think that estimate may be a little low, but it falls lower in any case when you had energy storage, and even lower when silver (which Bloomberg's says has already hit its production peak) becomes too scarce and costly and must be replaced by inferior materials. Notice that no PV cell manufacturer relies on PV's to supply its electrical needs. Wind is estimated at 18, but I think this is wildly optimistic. There are a vast number of costs associated with wind installation and maintenance, and the power output has been far lower than forecast, and deterioration is fairly rapid. 9. Geothermal: fairly low EROI (although I don't remember the number) and scalability issues on top of it. 10. Biofuels fail on EROI, competition for cropland, and other issues. No informed scientist thinks algae can ever be viable after decades of costly R&D, and cellulosic ethanol research has come up dry and that is not likely to change either. 11. LENR: maybe our best hope, but way more questions than answers at this point. 12. Fusion: Still 50 years away, maybe 30 with more funding. But when and *if* a working prototype is developed, it will still need to be refined until the EROI can be raised to at least 10, and then lots and lots of fusion plants will need to be built, which will take a long time. 13. And that brings us to the biggest short in history: modern civilization itself. For those of you who have young children or grandchildren, if they are fortunate enough to fulfill their three score years and ten, they will be laid to rest in a world that is vastly different from the one we have known. GDP is a measure of goods and services consumed, but which must first be produced. Production requires work, and work requires energy: either food calories, or other energy sources to fuel machines which raise the per person output of goods and services (productivity). Indeed, that is literally the definition of energy in the physical sciences: "the ability to do work." When the energy available per capita goes into persistent decline, work done per person must also decline, and thus goods and serves produced (and consumed) per person will therefore decline as well, making mankind poorer year after year. It will be the Greatest Depression. 14. Technology will not prevent this dismal outcome, because technology is fueled by--energy! Energy per capita and GDP per capita have always marched in lockstep. That will not change, because the link is intrinsic, "cause and effect." Unless we can find a breakthrough miracle energy source that can be scaled up quickly, The Big Short is coming. 15. And I have scarcely touched upon the problem of bottlenecks in the silver and lithium resources--there is simply not enough of either on this planet to produce *high-efficiency* PV cells or lithium electric car batteries in the quantities that our world requires, and a number of other important minerals also face resource constraints in the near future. 16. And in any case, electric batteries of any possible kind are wholly inadequate to fuel big trucks, air traffic, or transoceanic shipping. For 200 years, the world has gotten bigger. Soon it will begin to get smaller, perhaps shrinking faster than it grew. The true dismal science is not economics, but geology and physics. The carrying capacity for our species is going to fall.
I don't think that's true when you go by GAAP earnings, or so I have heard. I am always skeptical of non-GAAP.