Wow! One sentence and you managed to make comprehension errors on both short posts you mention.

I never claimed it would be half, and the person I replied to never claimed it would be a tenth.

And you fell into the trap of not considering that price is about negotiation and the power you have to negotiate.

The idea behind your question is that competition always ensures the lowest price for products. That is clearly not true, even in the naive theories of Adam Smith. It's even less true when you consider that the true mechanism is game theory, and Nash showed there are other equilibriums.

Lower the costs and reduce the profit margins by cutting out middle men and using economies of scale, and you can reduce the price. If you are motivated to do so.

Exactly. That was Apple's problem in the 90s. Their product offerings had become dated and uninspiring. Now they justify their premium. That's how they made a big turnaround.

It sounds like insurance. You are paying someone else to take on the risk. That costs extra money, but it's predictable.

Personally I self-insure everything for which there isn't a legal necessity to have insurance. I don't see any point in paying someone else to take a risk when I can do it myself.

If it's anything like bottled LPG, no thanks. Sometimes when you go to get a bottle they don't have any of the type you need in stock, and you have to chase round to find one. Then there's the problem of what you do when you run out of LPG and the shop is closed.

Halving the price would be an enormous gain!

And I rather suspect you will find it's not.

Sure. If you are a socialite of 100 years ago. New money these days is Tech. Oil is old money. Indeed it's heading towards an industry in decline.

Your opinion is that batteries don't make incremental improvements, but only revolutionary improvements once in long while when a completely new battery chemistry comes along.

Your opinion is completely wrong.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Two things. One is that things are always cheaper the more you buy. So those mined materials come cheaper if you have a big manufacturing facility.

Second is that actually most of the raw materials for the batteries will come from recycling old batteries. At the moment Tesla only does a minimal reprocessing themselves, then send old batteries off to 3rd parties to recycle. And those materials don;t come back.

The new factory will recycle as much as possible of the batteries into new batteries. Of the order of 90%.

Because conservatives can't stand change. And because the media that forms their opinions is funded by old money that's tied to oil.

Economy of scale and efficient recycling of old batteries.

The incentives for battery companies and an EV company are different. A battery company is quite happy if the market price of a battery remains high. An EV company wants it as low as possible.

Seems to me that as soon as a successful tech entrepreneur starts to become a household name, there's a irrational wave of vitriol and spite comes across a minority of Slashdot posters.

Bullshit. You have made that up.

Huh? The first generation of hybrids were the original Priuses, which are 17 years old. And user reports are that many of them are still running on original batteries. Replacement if needed is of the order of $2000.