V interesting talk, well worth skimming through on youtube.
What impressed me was the scope of their improvements, right from the mining, through mfr & the recycling at the very end. There's a coherent vision here, and the drive to achieve it. Lowering the cost of batteries to around half what it is today is really going to accelerate takeup on a huge scale, not just cars, but ships, Grid backups, domestic batteries, planes, trains, you name it.
E.g take the simple way that the single connection tab on current batteries is dispensed with, and replaced by an almost continuous set of edge-tabs all folded over; this is going to hugely reduce thermal losses inside the batteries, both during driving, but especially during charging. So I think we can expect to see far faster charging on even small batteries. Today we're seeing e.g. 40 kWh batteries being limited to 50 kW, that kind of thing; Ioniq 28 kWh charging at around 70 kW is exceptionally fast! But I think we'll see these new batteries charging a 50 kWh at maybe 250 kW. Leafgate thermal problems are going to be a thing of the past and just a bad memory.
Even their new way of extracting Lithium is impressive, assuming it scales up to industrial rates. Simply take Lithium-rich clay, mix with salty water & out comes the useable Lithium compound, at least that's how it looked to me. Sure there's need to be some purification etc. Elon says it's important for low cost to have the battery production v close to the source of the raw materials, and that makes sense to me. Doesn't bode well for the new Lithium mine dev't in Cornwall though, unless they can do a similar extraction & maybe source Nickel locally?