New breakthrough every month! Shame that almost all of them don't pan out.

If it makes you feel any better, gasoline stores 12,888.9 Wh/kg according to Wikipedia. So if you're worried energy density in car crashes, it's still much lower than the status quo.

However, now that you bring it up, given that the most efficient ICE cars are about 25% efficent, you get at most 3200Wh of actual usable propulsive energy from the kg of gasoline. If the claims pan out, that is within shooting distance of these Li-S batteries' specific energy, even when accounting for EVs' 60-80% battery-to-wheel efficiency.

I've also never given much thought to parking my gasoline fueled vehicles inside my garage. When ICE cars do spontaneously ignite, it's never because of the gasoline.

I do sometimes think about how prudent it is to park my Tesla underneath my kids' bedrooms every night while it starts charging unattended after everyone is asleep. I'm glad to have a smoke alarm in the garage.

On the other hand a battery fire is about the worst kind of fire a regular person might encounter in day to day life. It's a nightmare even for firefighters. They are very hard to put out and don't want to stay out. There's also no easy way to inspect the battery for such fire-causing potential defects. A single defective cell can cause a thermal runaway event.

It's the unpredictability that makes battery fires more dangerous. At this point we have no feasible preventive measures, no yearly service visits, no visual check for leaks, nothing.

If you could have a much longer range, then you could put up with more hassle to charge, which in turn could make some technologies feasible that would not be with lesser range.

For an extreme example, if you can go long enough on one charge then it might be feasible to use a non-rechargeable battery and replace it when it is out.

Believe it or not that has actually been considered. There is a company or two working on EVs using aluminum air batteries. Those are among the highest energy density available in batteries, comparable to gasoline. They are currently used in some military applications for aircraft and submarines.

The claim I've seen is that you could do an EV with these that would have a 2000 km range using less battery weight than current lithium ion EVs use. As I said, these aren't rechargeable, so every ~1800 km you'd have to take it in for a battery swap.

Presumably they would design these cars so that this would be a fairly easy operation. The dead battery would be sent back to the manufacturer for recycling. As the battery is used, the aluminum anodes become oxidized. The manufacturer can replace the anodes, and can extract the aluminum from the aluminum oxide and use that for making new anodes.

I'm sure smarter and knowledgable people have done the numbers on this; I should go find a good source ...

Sure, it’s a bit longer than a 5 minute fill up, but between bathroom breaks, food, coffee, it’s not that much longer and we no longer have gas station trips when around town (charging our Teslas at home). Trade offs. Seems like the amount of folks who are waiting for 400 mile range EVs is exceedingly small.

Minneapolis to Chicago is a bit longer (a little over 400 miles), and takes about 6 hours. For that I'd probably need to stop somewhere to eat.