As in many fields of technoscience that have yet to yield commercial products, the contemporary advanced secondary (rechargeable) battery sector (constituted primarily around devices employing lithium-based chemistries) depends heavily on expectations of future applications in order to marshal resources to sustain ongoing research operations. As in the biotech sector, the product development time horizon has been protracted owing to a mix of physical and social factors. Put simply, is it more difficult physically to move molecules than, say, bytes. Despite recent enthusiasm from and considerable investment by sectors of heavy industry, the requirement that advanced batteries meet or exceed every performance metric of incumbent power sources (above all, the internal combustion engine, a technology whose efficiency is constantly being improved on a massive scale) constitutes an ever-shifting performance benchmark that battery technologists cannot hope to match in the near future. Despite industrial investment on the order of several billion dollars a year and the launching of commercial battery electric auto ventures, this vicious cycle virtually guarantees instability in this sector. Efforts to develop an industrial base around lithium-based battery chemistries are further complicated by asymmetrical relations of trade and technology transfer. A peculiar situation has resulted. The United States has been at a disadvantage in developing this industry owing to historical neglect of the field of electrochemistry. No large American company produces large advanced batteries, unlike U.S. partners/competitors in this field. And yet the U.S. auto market and the national research and development apparatus have become indispensable components of the advanced battery value chain. The expansion of battery electric automobility, hence, would represent a sea change for the American auto industry, for it would mean that foreign firms would control the development and manufacturing of the automobile prime mover. This essay explores the emergence of the technoscience and political economy of the advanced batter sector as a means of elucidating the paradoxes of late-modern capitalism, above all, the relationship between existing, rapidly changing social relations of production and their justifying discourses, with a focus on lithium futurism.