Aside from what I discussed in the just-prior post, my other hesitation in buying a used EV is the eventual need to junk it. In particular, to get the batteries recycled.
Everybody seems to say, pish-tosh, by the time you’re at that stage, it’ll be easy. Cheap. Why, they’ll pay you good money for your clapped-out EV battery.
Me, I’m not so sure.
In the course of researching the just-prior post, I came across this:
Source: Teslarati
Last I checked, Tesla was only recycling Tesla batteries. That’s because at this point, it costs quite a bit to recycle a lithium-ion battery. That’s laid out in Post #1712, The Balkanization of the EV battery recycling market.
So, do the math. A typical Tesla battery pack is around 1500 pounds. A metric ton is about 2200 pounds. So that new factory, hitting this new recycling milestone, is capable of handling (52 x 100 x 2200 / 1500 =~ ) 7,500 dead Tesla battery packs, per year.
Tesla is selling how many cars, in the U.S., now. Oh, like half-a-million in 2022, and an even higher rate in 2023. So, at present, Tesla — which is ahead of the game, as far as I can tell — is set up to recycle … ah, call it 1.5% of the car batteries it is currently producing.
And if you read that article in depth, some of what they are doing is short of actual recycling. They are “stockpiling for future processing of any materials generated that cannot be immediately processed.”
Sure, you read about the one-off project here and there, where old car batteries are recycled into power walls, or storage for the grid, or whatnot. And maybe there are areas of the country where such things are so prevalent that people will buy your dead EV batteries.
But around here, near as I can tell, if I want to get rid of a big Li-ion car battery, I’m going to have to pay for the privilege. And I just have the feeling that EV Li-ion battery recycling, at the same scale as current battery production, is just a bomb waiting to explode.
