Grid storage only. But still cool
You will almost certainly see sodium-ion in cars. The Na batts already manufactured have a similar Wh/kg to Li batteries in EVs today. That’s because Li has progressed further, and it takes a few years for new batteries to go into actual EVs. Manufactures don’t necessarily use the top of the line batts, either, for cost or availability reasons.
If you feel a VW id.4 or a Hyundai Ioniq has sufficient range right now (or could have sufficient range if charging infrastructure was a better), then an Na batt will also be good enough. It’ll also be cheaper. Those cars come off the assembly line with Li batts that are similar to the 160 Wh/kg that Na batts out of CATL were doing in 2021.
I admire your optimism and I hope you’re correct. At least with the little “city commuters” it probably even makes sense. But lithium battery tech also continues to improve – so catching up with 2021 is great, but the goalposts keep moving.
There will be an absolute limit coming from physics and chemistry, and lithium is a smaller, lighter ion. In the theoretical limits, it will absolutely be the winner.
But from a practical perspective, if Na-ion becomes light enough and (more importantly) cheap enough, it will probably win the economic game in the longer term.
Plus we can make Na-ion batteries in-situ elsewhere in the solar system without having to first finding concentrations of lithium – so high tech space industry stuff will likely more towards Na-ion, which will fund some development.
We’re desperately in need of low-cost grid storage for all our high capacity renewables. Especially down in spots like Texas, where wind energy will send prices into the negatives for a few hours a day, then natural gas collusion jacks prices up into the quadruple digits, an industrial scale battery system would flatten the price curve.
