{"id":31715,"date":"2022-09-19T09:03:48","date_gmt":"2022-09-19T13:03:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/autosector.com\/?p=31715"},"modified":"2022-09-19T09:03:48","modified_gmt":"2022-09-19T13:03:48","slug":"nissan-exec-ev-battery-longevity-exceeding-expectations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/autosector.com\/?p=31715","title":{"rendered":"Nissan Exec Says Nearly All LEAF EV Batteries Are Still In Cars"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article comes to us courtesy of\u00a0EVANNEX<\/a>, which makes and sells aftermarket Tesla accessories. The opinions expressed therein are not necessarily our own at\u00a0InsideEVs<\/a>, nor have we been paid by\u00a0EVANNEX\u00a0to publish these articles. We find the company’s perspective as an aftermarket supplier of Tesla accessories interesting and are happy to share its content free of charge. Enjoy!<\/em><\/p>\n

Posted on<\/span>\u00a0EVANNEX on September 18, 2022,\u00a0by<\/span>\u00a0Charles Morris<\/p>\n

Among the never-ending flood of \u201cDon\u2019t get me wrong\u2014I love electric vehicles, but…\u201d articles and posts, we read dire warnings that EV batteries will wear out in a few years, making the cars worthless, and that they can\u2019t be recycled.<\/p>\n

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Above: A Nissan Leaf at a home charging station. Photo:\u00a0dcbel<\/a>\u00a0\/ Unsplash<\/em><\/p>\n

Oddly enough, the citizen journalists who write these pieces never seem to cite any sources for their helpful information about battery life. What do the people who work for automakers who\u2019ve actually been selling EVs have to say about the issue?<\/p>\n

Well, as Nissan<\/a>\u2019s UK Marketing Director Nic Thomas recently told Forbes, \u201cAlmost all of the [EV] batteries we\u2019ve ever made are still in cars, and we\u2019ve been selling electric cars for 12 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

The much-predicted glut of obsolete EV batteries has not materialized, despite the fervent hopes of the anti-EV crowd. As Carlton Reid explains in\u00a0a recent\u00a0Forbes<\/em>\u00a0article<\/a>, unlike phones or laptops, EVs have sophisticated battery management systems (BMS) that are designed to maximize battery life. In the US, automotive battery packs are warranted against failure for 8 years or 100,000 miles by federal law, and industry experts expect most battery packs to last much longer than that. (Battery\u00a0failure<\/em>\u00a0and battery\u00a0degradation<\/em>\u00a0are two different things\u2014all batteries lose capacity over time, and some drivers may find the gradual reduction in range unsatisfactory.)<\/p>\n

\u201cWe haven\u2019t got a great big stock of batteries that we can convert into something else,\u201d said Thomas. \u201cIt\u2019s the complete opposite of what people feared when we first launched EVs\u2014that the batteries would only last a short time.\u201d Many EV batteries may outlast their vehicles, then enjoy a second life in a stationary storage application before finally being recycled. \u201cAt the end of the vehicle\u2019s life\u201415 or 20 years down the road\u2014you take the battery out of the car, and it\u2019s still healthy, with perhaps 60 or 70% of usable charge.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTaking the battery out [of an electric car] and putting a new battery in is not a viable proposition,\u201d he adds. \u201cIt\u2019s more sustainable to take the battery pack out of the car after 20 years, recycle the car, and reuse the battery. By far the easiest thing to do take the complete battery out of the vehicle, put it in a shipping container in a rack and plug that into a solar farm.\u201d<\/p>\n

To date, Nissan has collected only a small number of Leaf batteries\u2014from crashed vehicles or warranty issues\u2014and it has supplied some of these to\u00a0providers of stationary storage<\/a>. Thomas says that Nissan\u2019s\u00a0new factory<\/a>\u00a0currently under construction in Sunderland, England will use EV batteries to store energy from solar panels and wind turbines.<\/p>\n

As for recycling, battery manufacturers, automakers and startup companies are working to develop what could someday be\u00a0a major new industry<\/a>. The European Union already regulates EV battery disposal, and is expected to update its regulations soon to establish targets for the recovery of specific minerals.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is already a very strong recycling industry for batteries in China,\u201d said Thomas. \u201cI\u2019ve visited lots of plants in China where they grind the battery down to what they call black mass, which then enables them to extract all of the precious metals.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Volkswagen Group recently opened\u00a0a battery R&D facility<\/a>\u00a0in Salzgitter, Germany, which will eventually recycle EV batteries.<\/p>\n

Redwood Materials<\/a>, a battery recycling firm led by Tesla<\/a> cofounder JB Straubel, recently raised $700 million from investors to expand its Carson City, Nevada, operations. Straubel recently told Forbes that his company can already recapture usable quantities of metals at a lower cost than mining.<\/p>\n

Demand for large-scale recycling probably lies some years in the future. \u201cI\u2019ll be very old and very retired by the time we actually need to do a lot of these things,\u201d Nic Thomas told Forbes.<\/p>\n

However, building a circular supply chain for batteries is a project that needs to proceed with all deliberate speed. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates current global recycling capacity at around 180,000 metric tons of batteries per year. Recycling experts told Forbes that the EVs sold in 2019 alone will eventually generate 500,000 metric tons of battery waste. The IEA says that by 2040, there could be 1,300 GWh worth of spent batteries in need of recycling.<\/p>\n

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This article originally appeared in\u00a0Charged<\/a>. Author:\u00a0Charles Morris<\/a>. Source:\u00a0Forbes<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

===<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article comes to us courtesy of\u00a0EVANNEX, which makes and sells aftermarket Tesla accessories. The opinions expressed therein are not necessarily our own at\u00a0InsideEVs, nor have we been paid by\u00a0EVANNEX\u00a0to publish these articles. We find the company’s perspective as an aftermarket supplier of Tesla accessories interesting and are happy to share its content free of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8313,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-e-cars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/autosector.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/autosector.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/autosector.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/autosector.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/autosector.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/autosector.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/autosector.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/autosector.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/autosector.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/autosector.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}