The article mentions 2nd & 3rd lives for the battery in the electric power grid. That suggests people would use the battery in a vehicle until the vehicle wore out or became obsolete. Then the battery would be used to store electricity for the power grid. That is already being done — you charge the battery at night when rates are cheap, and sell it back to the grid during peak hours. Depending on the cost/kWh for the battery storage, that can be quite profitable.
There would be an after-market for the batteries, which would reduce the cost of ownership for the cars. Some people could even sell back some power every day they own the car — which would offset part or even all of the cost of the electricity they use for driving.
A battery pack good for 1MM miles would absolutely be a game-changer.
Yes, I read that summary but didn’t see the details in the OP. Your comment was indeed my assumption; but just as well you could move the batteries to another “new” car.
A few years back Tesla put out a video showing a prototype battery exchange side by side with a video of filling up a tank of gas. What they were showing was you could drive a Tesla into a “battery exchange station” where they would simply pull out your nearly empty batteries, and have freshly charged batteries installed in about the same time as it would take to fill a tank of gasoline. Then the removed batteries would go into a charger for a few hours and swapped into another vehicle sometime later. In other words, if you wanted to take a road trip there would be no need to drive to a charging station, maybe wait for a high volt charger to open up, and and then 30-60 minutes to get juiced up.
I see ads for home battery systems all the times; still quite expensive. They may make economic sense at the current time but probably not if they become ubiquitous unless the prices for the batteries come way down. That could happen if they go “1 million miles” and can be dual/triple use for cars, homes, warehouses etc. But no matter what, energy has to be generated and “peak usage time” could sprawl a bit.