Captain Caveman
Platinum Member
I have a household socket for a VCR and a microwave oven, not so for a car unless the leads are over 60 metres long and charge in the same time frame as watching a movie or heating up a lasagna. Saving up £1,200 or paying it back is a tad bit easier than £50,000. And the reality with EV's, prices are still not getting cheap, they're doing the opposite. If they do by the end of the decade, they will still be over 50% more expensive than an ICE equivalent vehicle.
As the EV market trundles along to end of life EV's, cost in terms of money and the environment to recycle batteries doesn't look promising.
Partly due to the cost and complexity of EV battery disassembly, today’s recycling methods are fairly crude. After the battery is discharged and the tough outer casing is removed, modules are often shredded and thrown in a furnace. Lighter materials like lithium and manganese burn, leaving behind an alloy slurry that contains higher-value metals like copper, nickel, and cobalt. Individual metals can then be purified out of that alloy using strong acids. These processes, known as pyro- and hydrometallurgical recovery, require large amounts of energy and produce toxic gases and waste products that need to be re-captured.
As electric vehicles take off, we'll need to recycle their batteries
Electric car batteries contain critical minerals like cobalt and lithium. We’ll need to recycle them unless we want to keep mining the earth for new ones.
