Bill Gates also has a track record of screwing things up and profiting either way. 
Did anyone check to see if he’s also invested in Big Milk™ and Big Beef™ - in case things go sideways again and the supply of both suddenly becomes scarce?
Big Burp™ and Big Fart™
I’m sensing a marketing strategy here.
Well, I wish him all the luck. Beats doing nothing.
Electric cars might not be the silver bullet some like to pretend that they are…
We need a larger shift to public transit being the predominant form of getting around.
Maybe? (This is very much not ready for prime time, but the potential is there.)
I hope they find an alternative… right now, at least in my state, they are leaning hard into the current lithium ion technology. At some point, these things seem to reach a critical mass in an industry, and they reject alternatives, as they’ve already put a lot of their eggs into this basket…
It’s frustrating, because this is still a case of putting the markets ahead of what is best for us and the planet. 
I’ve been checking every now and then for an update on Hydro Quebec’s commercialization of John Goodenough’s 2016 glass electrolyte lithium-ion battery. Frustratingly, I’ve found nothing further than the press releases from 3 years ago. That has the potential to cut the estimates for lithium required in half and the batteries themselves won’t catch fire.
But yes, the Sodium thing looks good and I like that it appears not to require nasty metals. There’s also some new work at the University of Waterloo on a solid state electrolyte for a lithium battery, again, nothing obnoxious or rare required.
As for overall transport mix, I’m spoiled by my time in 
where, on average, each person travels 2400km by rail per year.
Sodium party! 
I suppose, having grown up around nuclear, I think of “nasty” being heavy, radioactive metals. Cesium is nasty…
This video tape clearly demonstrates that sodium can throw itself farther than you can. And more ominously, you can clearly see on at least one of the jumps that it tends to come back at the direction it was thrown from. My theory is that when it hits the water it forms a cavity as it plunges down. This cavity acts like a cannon barrel to direct the chunk back in the direction it came from, when the steam and evolved hydrogen explode.
yeah, yeah… OT…
Unprecedented rain and flooding in Auckland 
.
As a USAian, I fully expected this to be about a shooting…
