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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.