> The first of these was announced just last week when the Chinese battery-maker that supplies most of the major car makers, including Tesla, revealed it had produced the first "million mile battery".<p>> Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) says its new battery is capable of powering a vehicle for more than a million miles (1.2 million, to be precise - or 1.9 million km) over a 16-year lifespan.<p>I keep being told Tesla has some big tech advantage, but here they are buying the same batteries as everyone else.
This is mostly assumptions, we don't know if any of this is true. Tesla has some news about batteries and they are working on something, if it just that the buy the same batteries as everybody else it would be pretty weak. I don't think that's it.
If there's an article about Elon Musk's achievements and contributions I'd like to read about, it certainly won't be from the BBC, who's technical content still glosses over details and is stuck in the 1990s.
While I also hope for a revolutionary leap in battery technology one should remember that Elon says a log of things and sincerely means all of them until he is sued at which point he was just exercising his First Amendment right to say whatever he wants.
So far the biggest revolution to batteries seems to have been economies of scale.<p>Sure, there are minor improvements to chemistry as well, but AFAIK, nothing on the order of price reduction that happened in the last decade.