261
Battery costs have declined by 99% in the last three decades, making electrified transport a reality
(ourworldindata.org)
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
261 points (96.1% liked)
Technology
83251 readers
4345 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As it happens, actually I was buying batteries in the 1970's. They were massive and lasted plenty long enough to play audio cassettes for several days.
Edit: I'd also point out that three decades is 1996, not 1976, that's five decades.
Nonono that is outright false, even 6 of the big D batteries, would last only a few hours in even a small ghetto blaster of the late 70's. Radio yes, tape no. The tapes took massive amounts of power even in a small player for the time.
But apart from that all other uses of batteries were a pain, like in flashlights that weren't even very good by today's standards, or bicycle lights where batteries were a joke so we had to use dynamos.
Your memory is simply wrong. IDK if they have declined 99%, but for sure batteries today are both 10 times better and only a tenth the price compared to the 70's.
Although they are just fake numbers that seem right, it actually fits with the 99%
Althoug 3 decades only brings us back to the mid 90's, I think that at least in some cases it is true.
Batteries are way cheaper and better now, whether it's 80% or 99% IDK, but for sure iẗ́s more than 80%.
Having had a mono radio cassette player in my bedroom in 1976, running off D-cells, that was not my experience.
The biggest drain was the volume, not the cassette player. You noticed it getting slower and slower, but the drain came from playing it loud.
My Sony Walkman a few years later ran forever on its batteries.
Admittedly I never had a walkman. Maybe you were more privileged than I was, because I remember batteries as very expensive.
But a walkman was way way later than the 70's.,
The Walkman came out in 79 and was cheap enough for a present to a teen or young adult by 82, at the latest. Hell, if you wanted to raid your parents' stuff, they may well have had a (mono) folio style cassette recorder or even a Sony TC-50 cassette recorder/player (which looks exactly* like a Walkman), made as early as 1968! They brought them to the Moon during the Apollo program. That's right, cassettes technically came BEFORE 8-Tracks.
But they were too expensive until the late 70s, and by then most people already had an 8-track collection, so it took a few more years to mass adopt.
Source: I have mono demo tapes that my dad recorded from his poor Oklahoma farm town in 1970
Oh the issue about the Walkman had nothing to do with price, I just didn't like the format.
My point wasn't really about the price, but availability. You said you remembered Walkman as "way way later than the 70s" and I was just pointing out that, technically, they were kind of around the WHOLE 70s, just not priced or marketed in a way that they would have been very common, and hence why you remember them "way way later" (probably sometime around 82-84, right?)
OK for me the 80's are way later, because the two were a threshold between two eras.
So to me 78 is way way later than 82. In the sense that that was the time things began to turn to shit politically.
We actually had a very popular song here in Denmark, about how buying a walk man made things sound like new your man.
Back then USA was kind of both cool but also something that we shouldn't strive to copy.
The problem is that I had zero interest in anything like a walk man.
My interest was in big high power HiFi.
Batteries are better, but not by that much, assuming you stick with the same technology - don't compare alkaline to lithium or something. Efficiency of electronics is much better. The improvement in flashlights is about LEDs
Modern batteries are way way better than they used to be, even alkaline is better and were quite expensive in the 90's.
But it's not only how much better they are, it's the prices, alkaline is standard today, and you barely even look at the price, because they are dirt cheap.
But you are right that in electronics there have been much improvements, a modern flashlight is easily a 100 times better because of both LED and better batteries. LED improved it probably by a factor of about 10.
But for many things like a laptop, the power consumption hasn't gone down that much, because the better batteries have actually made it possible to make more powerful laptops instead. the power consumption of a modest laptop CPU alone id 65 Watt, which would be HUGE in the 80's.
I agree the 99% sounds like much, but I can attest to at least 80% probably more like 90% better batteries than the early 90's.
Lithium batteries really was a game-changer, especially if you consider only rechargeable batteries.