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Is there any good writeup on the 'geophysical ignorance' anywhere? I checked out some of the comments but they all seemed to be along the lines of 'hydrogen rules, batteries drool', and I can't take hydrogen-car proposals very seriously given Tesla's demonstrated success.
In any case, I read this a few days ago and found it very interesting. He's at least up front about the fanboying, and the overoptimism seems to come from Musk directly (before I read this, I assumed that Musk's talk of going to Mars before 2030 was so much PR intended to keep his mystique alive and stock prices & valuations high and, among other things, deflect attention from the extent to which his companies are still dependent on subsidies; after, I began to take seriously the idea he might actually believe all that), and if nothing else, it seems like this is the closest thing to a comprehensive Musk manifesto - which is interesting all on its own.
I don't know much about electric cars, but AFAIK the general consensus was that battery-powered EVs are largely infeasible unless there is some breakthrough in battery technology. Did Tesla achieve that or did they just use bigger and more expensive Li-ion batteries?
If I understand correctly, there isn't enough easily recoverable lithium in the world to replace but a small fraction of existing vehicles with Li-ion battery-powered EVs. If that's correct then, barring some breakthrough, Teslas will be forever expensive (and government subsidized) toys for rich people to signal wealth and environmental consciousness.
I do know that battery technology steadily, if unflashily, improves over time; from my evernotes, see for example the Performance Curves Database for some charts or https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-battery-energy-density-improves-5-8-per-year or http://rameznaam.com/2015/04/30/tesla-powerwall-battery-economics-almost-there/
I don't know about this specifically, but that sounds surprising: isn't lithium one of the most common elements in the universe?
This was a minor point in Watchmen, which is where I first heard of it, so this has been the popular perception for why EVs didn't happen for at least 30 years. It appears to be a somewhat serious concern, but as our experience with oil shows, provable known reserves track price to a degree that pessimistic calculations rarely take into account. (Lithium ion batteries also appear to be easily but expensively recyclable, meaning that once the price gets high enough, the total amount of active lithium is the issue, not the demand for new lithium each year.)
Hydrogen is even more common than lithium, but good luck mining it.
It's just a matter of price. At a sufficiently high price for hydrogen there would be no problems in supplying very large quantities of it.
Not even all that high - water is pretty common...
Basically, the price of energy to split water into oxygen and hydrogen is a hard ceiling for the price of hydrogen.