Brilliant article, very well done. I will only weigh in on the open question, why not buy the next X car model directly from LG? I would say we are a long way off from that due to safety regulations and related liability issues. LG may make a part of a car, a battery, but the car crashes "as a unit," not as a bunch of components. (This is one reason modular assembly of cars never caught on: no one module supplier wanted to take on liability for the whole car crashing, and no OEM wanted the liability without having more control over the modules.) So LG would have to replicate all the skills involved in creating the whole car, especially crashworthiness. Can this be done? Of course, see Tesla. But Tesla's margins in the $100,000 vehicle segment can cover a lot of spending on safety: battery margins are very thin and are likely to remain so, as far as I can tell. And to improve those margins maybe more scale is needed, and more scale means mass-market cars, and now we are down to thin CAR margins as well. All in all, I think battery suppliers would rather sell batteries to everyone (driving up volume and thus down costs) than to forward-integrate into building the cars themselves, which is a lower-margin higher-liability industry. Any cell-phone battery or component company could (and some do) forward-integrate into phones, but then again, when a phone fails, no one dies in a fiery crash. Enthusiasts will argue that autonomous cars will eliminate the safety issue, but that is a long way off: remember that humans are actually excellent drivers, covering 100 million miles (in the USA) between fatalities. Eventually we get there, but not for years yet, IMHO.