>In Oklahoma City, the batteries in the SNT warehouse mostly came from cars that are still under warranty, which means the automakers are responsible for them. Tyler Helps, the company’s head of business development, says automakers are paying SNT to keep their old batteries because they don’t know what the used battery market is going to look like and whether the materials inside the battery might be more valuable in the future. “So instead of the automakers saying, ‘I'm going to go and dispose of those materials,’ they say, ‘I’m just going to hold onto it,’” he says.
I am not convinced of the analysis, it is more likely that the car makers know that the cost of disposing properly (and in large volumes) such batteries today would be astronomical (let's say - only for the sake of reasoning - US$ 2,000 per car) and prefer to pay (say) US$ 50/year to SNT and postpone the problem by - still say - 10 or 20 years (and most probably they already charged you, inside the price of your new electric vehicle, some US$ 3,000, to stay on the safe side)
In a nutshell, you don't want right now to actually own an electric car past its warranty, you'd be better served by long renting or similar, as there is a concrete risk that if/when your batteries die, there won't be (yet) an effective way to get rid of them cleanly and you may have to pay a non-trivial amount of money for disposing of the battery.
Additionally, it seems to me like this opens a (large) can of worms when it comes to used vehicles.
Will there be specialized technicians/organizations that will give you some form of warranty on the batteries?
The question is how much material can be reclaimed from the battery.
Batteries are resource gold mines with most material readily available (the casing, for example, would be the easiest thing to recycle).
Further, simple recycling (burn everything) of the inner parts is almost certainly worth it just to reclaim the current contents of nickel and cobalt.
What's not clear is if other resources can be reclaimed or if this can be taken further. Can we also reclaim the electrolyte (The substance between the anode and cathode)? Can we do all this without smelting down parts?
That's the unknown. That's also what manufactures are saying when they say "we don't know if this will be more or less valuable in the future." Because, as you can imagine, if recycling is simply applying a chemical wash to the electrolyte and reusing everything else, then you've saved $1000s of dollars avoiding making a new battery.
If, on the other hand, that's not possible, then smelting will still happen as that reclaims expensive materials (primarily nickel and cobalt) at a fraction of the cost of mining them fresh.
In other words, we know how to recycle battery materials. We don't know if we can recycle all of the battery materials. As a result, battery manufactures are just waiting until the cost of manufacturing new batteries becomes cost prohibitive without starting a recycling plant.
>The question is how much material can be reclaimed from the battery.
My question was rather different, much more simple/practical.
Today (not tomorrow, not ten years from now) I own a "normal" ICE car and for some reasons it breaks beyond any possible repair.
Currently (and it may depend on countries) I can sell the wreck to someone authorized to dismantle it and get a few hundred bucks for it or - in the worst case - pay someone to dismantle/recycle it a few hundred bucks (and I can - within limits - choose among many companies that provide this services according to the current Law).
What would happen (still today) if the car was an electric one?
The only difference is the battery cells might be stored instead of immediately recycled. (though, already there's a pretty hopping market for second hand battery packs from salvaged vehicles. Lots of people like to turn those into energy storage for homes/etc).
The simple practical answer is that storing batteries, right now, makes more sense than trying to immediately salvage them. Not because they are unsalvageable, but because future expected salvaging operations are expected to reuse more of the material.
But your question in many ways is less practical. Statistically cars have lifespans that we can chart out rather well. We can see that we have X tons of old batteries today, and on some tomorrow we'll have X+Y tons of old batteries. Which is important. Industry tends to scale. Working with 100 tons of material may not be an economical in a batch process. But when you have a million tons of the same materials you build an entire facility around said process and the small efficiencies add up at every step.
And - again - this has nothing to do with the question I asked/the issue I was talking about, which is not what happens to batteries, it is about who does the whatever is (considered lawful) supposed to be done with them and how much it will cost me, it remains a VERY practical question.
Who (names of the companies) today (not tomorrow, not in ten years time) will pick up my wrecked electric car (and its batteries)?
For an old, traditional, ICE car I open the local phone directory and can find a handful of car wreckers that are authorized to scrap the car.
Here (Italy, but I believe that several EU countries are in this same situation) they won't touch an electric vehicle with a ten foot pole.
They are not authorized to handle or store lithium batteries (that are considered dangerous wastes) and don't have the (safety) qualifications nor tools to handle mid-range voltages.
There are in the making some new EU norms (and investments) related to "circular economy" for the EV batteries:
but right now they are e-waste, the so-called RAEE/WEEE, and while there is a code 160005 (that is for batteries coming from phones, notebooks, etc.) EV batteries are likely to fall in the 160215 code (which is dangerous parts removed from assemblies).
We are talking (if you can find anyone that will dismantle them) of roughly 4/5 Euro/kg for the disposal fees.
These batteries are not being thrown away and wasted.
There's a pretty big second hand market for salvaged batteries. Except in the case of catastrophic failure, these batteries are either being stored for later recycling, or being sold outright for a second use unchanged.
The $2000USD figure is approximately correct. We've run the numbers to be between $800-3200 depending on the weight of the battery, and how difficult it is to disassemble. 3200 for a 700kg Porsche Tycan battery.
(My cofounder and I launched a company to disassemble the batteries robotically, if you're interested in helping us build it, please message me).
As an FYI there's no way to directly message capability here on HN so if you're interested in people being able to reach you you might want to put some form of contact info in your profile.
>In a nutshell, you don't want right now to actually own an electric car past its warranty, you'd be better served by long renting or similar
If you can tolerate the risk, a used, out-of-warranty ev can be pretty economical. You'd want to do something to evaluate the condition of the battery, and then accept that there is some probability of a battery failure that will not be worth fixing.
This has all the hallmarks of liability shift as well. Akin to the "superfund" sites. While I dont think this will be that extreme I can see more than a few of these companies that just house this kind of thing quietly going bankrupt leaving the local (or federal) tax payers holding the bill to do the proper disposal
>In Oklahoma City, the batteries in the SNT warehouse mostly came from cars that are still under warranty, which means the automakers are responsible for them. Tyler Helps, the company’s head of business development, says automakers are paying SNT to keep their old batteries because they don’t know what the used battery market is going to look like and whether the materials inside the battery might be more valuable in the future. “So instead of the automakers saying, ‘I'm going to go and dispose of those materials,’ they say, ‘I’m just going to hold onto it,’” he says.
I am not convinced of the analysis, it is more likely that the car makers know that the cost of disposing properly (and in large volumes) such batteries today would be astronomical (let's say - only for the sake of reasoning - US$ 2,000 per car) and prefer to pay (say) US$ 50/year to SNT and postpone the problem by - still say - 10 or 20 years (and most probably they already charged you, inside the price of your new electric vehicle, some US$ 3,000, to stay on the safe side)
In a nutshell, you don't want right now to actually own an electric car past its warranty, you'd be better served by long renting or similar, as there is a concrete risk that if/when your batteries die, there won't be (yet) an effective way to get rid of them cleanly and you may have to pay a non-trivial amount of money for disposing of the battery.
Additionally, it seems to me like this opens a (large) can of worms when it comes to used vehicles.
Will there be specialized technicians/organizations that will give you some form of warranty on the batteries?