A big advantage of its sodium cells is also the fact that they can retain more than 92% of their capacity even when operating at -20°C (-4 Fahrenheit) and discharging at those freezing temps.
That is very promising to hear. My current vehicle, which uses first-generation lithium batteries (made on 2011), loses almost half of its range at that temperature, and that is before heating.
As far as I know (which is not a lot in this case), salt isn't really harvested from desalination, and instead the concentrated salt solution (brine) gets deposited back into the ocean, where it can be damaging to marine life in the vicinity of the plant.
There are salt flats and salt mines, which are potentially cheaper than desalination (they're literally just digging up the ground and putting it into a truck), but desalination also has a huge excess of salt that ends up being dumped into the ocean; more sodium demand would be good for the environment.
Iirc, the problem with desalination is that it doesn't actually produce salt, just a very salty water slurry. So for them to produce usable salt they'd have to dry it out or something. Not that that sounds like it would be particularly difficult, but it's an extra step.