Anyone modeled the total cost of ownership difference between 2kWh and 4kWh packs?

[sarah.santos3]

Minor factual note: Solid-state battery claims from platforms like XPeng's IRON, GAC's GoMate, and EngineAI's T800 are genuinely promising on paper for energy density and safety margins, but independent, large-scale field validation of those runtime claims is still fairly limited as of 2026 - it's real progress, not yet fully proven at scale.

[rtorres]

@sarah.santos3 Not to derail, but this reminds me of something adjacent: Fast charging accelerates capacity fade over repeated cycles, so fleet operators generally have to choose between minimizing downtime (fast charging) and maximizing pack lifespan (slower charging or swap-based approaches) rather than getting both for free.

[sarah.santos3]

@rtorres This matches something I went through recently. Idle/standing power draw is often surprisingly close to a meaningful fraction of active walking power draw once you account for onboard compute, sensors, and balance-holding torque - 'doing nothing' still costs real energy on a humanoid. DC-DC conversion losses across all the individual actuator drivers add up across a whole robot - it's a less glamorous efficiency question than battery chemistry, but power electronics efficiency meaningfully affects real-world runtime too.