Battery breakthrough could change everything

Hailable fleets of self driving cars could get around the range and charging times, with current technology.

Charging times: fleet is driving most of the time. There's a home base that is also charging batteries simultaneously. When one starts to run low, they head home and swap out the battery. Even if the swap takes 10 or 15 minutes, that wouldn't affect utilization rates too much. Though, depending on the economics of utilization, having the home base just provide Tesla-style superchargers could also be fine.

Range: this is a bit trickier, but not insurmountable. You can have transfer stations every couple hundred miles. And perfectly timed transfers wouldn't be too hard. Though even there a self driving electric bus would have cut out the most expensive component (labor) and would have significantly more range than a regular electric car. I wonder if SF to LA would be doable on a single trip.

My main concern with the electric vehicle hockey stick growth curve is sourcing the cobalt required in Li-ion battery chemistry (although there are non cobalt versions LiFePo with worse metrics). One of the basic problems is how does a cobalt miner know whether or not something like this article's battery doesn't pop into existence just as soon as they put in billions of dollars to get a cobalt mine going. I have a suspicion that Tesla is waiting to be more clearly stable financially and then they will do something to derisk cobalt miners (like promise the purchase of a boatload of cobalt at a certain price).