It depends on the future of course, but like how lithium first showed up in phones, then laptops, then larger and larger things - if something comes out to replace lithium in certain use cases, say iron batteries for grid storage, then all that lithium can be recycled back into the mix.

Or if there's an expensive but newer medium that starts going in phones, then tablets, then laptops, then power tools, and so on - all those batteries get recycled back into the lithium pool

To me the interesting idea is industrial uses.

Take steel making for example, you have molten iron at one stage, then at a later stage you water cool it.

With further engineering you could pump the heat from the water cooling stage to heat the container of molten iron.

Obviously we're a far way from using heat exchangers to melt iron, but the point is if you can work out something like a preheat so you're heating the iron to 200F before melting it you can use a lot less energy, plus you save energy and water from the water cooling process.

So if you could reduce energy used in steelmaking by like 10% and water by 20% - that would be huge globally.

Well if there's profit to be extracted it's a sure bet deep pockets will extract it so I can only see it going this way:

1. Private equity and major corporations create robotaxi fleets
2. They all compete - some go out of business, others merge
3. It settles into an equilibrium where each city is a duopoly, giving the appearance of competition
4. In reality though the prices are artificially high because as the price point they stopped competing at includes large profit amounts.

eh you never know, understanding how the plaque works and how to get rid of it may yield something beneficial in the future.