It’s 8 years...basically 150,000 miles (unless you drive it 24/7, which is quite hard with a battery car). Not bad, but FAR from infinite, and where’s the 20 years? Is that also fictitious too?
The fact is they lithium battery formulations, whether the LiFP or other derivative formulations are not only a increasing in energy density, they are charging faster as well. There are companies like Quantimscape that are showing that recycled Lithium actually performs superior to virgin lithium due to 42% increases porous nature created by the recycling nature
My company is working on reclamation of spent lithium (carbonate or peroxide) batteries in a green method, where we recover each element, and the reagents are continuously filtered and raises. Give us a spent lithium battery, and 4 hours later we give you battery grade Aluminum, Cobalt, Nickel, Manganese, Lithium and copper - which immediately go back into the supply chain
Cobalt, which is typically Chinese slave labor mined; once recovered is now considered both virgin, and “made in USA” regardless of where the original battery was made.
We can also extract lithium from clay, non-thermally. Which is a pretty big deal
Whether the energy storage is used for transportation, municipal power storage, personal use, or medical; the fact we can now efficiently and cheaply store and recover TW worth of power is a game changer