alt Hacker NewsIt's surprising how far there is from discovery to production for these kinds of things. It's 14 years ago now that I designed the front cover for Advanced Energi Materials[1] wherein my friend described his similar discovery of the incredible properties of LiMnO4 with Carbon Nanotubes. Even though he had it working with measurable improvements in the 20-40x range he said it would take 10-20 years to reach a state for mass production.
[1] https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/aen...
I wasn't surprised the least. But I am also a hardware guy. Going into production with such new technologies means first making aure it is even feasible for mass production and long term use. There are ways to speed up these tests, but if you need a battery to last 10+ years, you will only be able to speed it up by so much — especially if it is new experimental tech.
If it is, there are probably multiple intermediate small scale experiments and then the tooling and production line technology might still need to be developed as well. Someone in a lab making a theoretical discovery is not the same as something making sense commercially in the slightest.