I know, it's not a traight forward choice. I could get a quote without the pension being affected and it would still be ~£440.
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EV prices
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I know, it's not a traight forward choice. I could get a quote without the pension being affected and it would still be ~£440.
That’s where your assumptions are out of step with the market. Even the batteries from a very well used leaf (the worst possible example) are very valuable and are worth a lot of money because they can be used for other applications like static storage which doesn’t have the same space/power constraints that a car does. Even if the pack has a dead module, the rest of the pack is still worth good money.
The rest of the drivetrain (assuming it still works), is also worth a good chunk of money on the secondary market but it’s mainly the cells that people really want.
Show me one application of a leaf going into a commercially viable application? It’s just enthusiasts talking about it. Most people just buy a dedicate Home battery
Used leaf batteries get recycled into home storage batteries, can't comment on whether it is commercially viable but there is that process, still the owner of a dead leaf won't be profiting much from that
Not a leaf but I’m not sure the specific car is relevant.
www.renaultgroup.com
electrek.co
I’m pretty sure a coal plant in Germany has a huge battery bank connected to it made from used BMW i3 cells but I can’t find the link.
You should also consider that in reality, the volume of second hand batteries actually entering the market is quite small as they have only been on the roads for 12 years. Nearly all of them are from crashed cars rather than being at end of their useful automotive life.
A second life for batteries: from energy usage to industrial storage
Connected Energy, a specialist in award-winning energy storage solutions that give a second life to electric vehicle batteries, has ordered comissioned its largest ever second-life battery energy storage system, the E-STOR.
Renault installs electric car charging stations powered by used EV battery packs
Renault technically owns a lot of electric car battery packs thanks to its Zoe program under which they sell the...
electrek.co
I’m pretty sure a coal plant in Germany has a huge battery bank connected to it made from used BMW i3 cells but I can’t find the link.
You should also consider that in reality, the volume of second hand batteries actually entering the market is quite small as they have only been on the roads for 12 years. Nearly all of them are from crashed cars rather than being at end of their useful automotive life.
I would never buy a corsa ICE version for £13k new let alone used
Soldato
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Well partially agree, with hindsight it was a bad call, but it was highly effective in achieving the goals of the time
With hindsight we should have pumped far more effort into reducing fossil fuel usage back then.
So your argument is along the lines of, in 15 years time we will decide that global warming was less significant than something else that should have been prioritised instead, I cannot imagine we will, but of course thats not impossible.
Surely this is the key point behind those bespoke schemes;Not a leaf but I’m not sure the specific car is relevant.
A second life for batteries: from energy usage to industrial storage
Connected Energy, a specialist in award-winning energy storage solutions that give a second life to electric vehicle batteries, has ordered comissioned its largest ever second-life battery energy storage system, the E-STOR.
Renault installs electric car charging stations powered by used EV battery packs
Renault technically owns a lot of electric car battery packs thanks to its Zoe program under which they sell the...
I’m pretty sure a coal plant in Germany has a huge battery bank connected to it made from used BMW i3 cells but I can’t find the link.
You should also consider that in reality, the volume of second hand batteries actually entering the market is quite small as they have only been on the roads for 12 years. Nearly all of them are from crashed cars rather than being at end of their useful automotive life.
So as a group Renault can plan the obsolescence of batteries in pre-determined quantities against a specified use.
I agree that the battery lease model is a good example of how battery "second life" might work but I can't see it ever becoming an off the shelf consumer product. By its nature it suits a specific bespoke application(s). The problem we have is we've moved away from a battery lease model now so they'll still be attached to your Ioniq 5 when it ends up at Bobs Breakers yard.
Yup and bobs breakers yard can extract the pack and sell them to whoever wants them on the open market.
I never said it would become an off the shelf consumer product at that stage but breakers selling to business buyers is perfectly reasonable. Be that back to the manufacturer or some other third party business that will remanufacture them into other products.
Why would bob recycle them when there is a market that wants used cells that they could sell into? That’s the purpose of breakers at the end of the day, strip off what’s useful, sell it and crush the rest.
I never said it would become an off the shelf consumer product at that stage but breakers selling to business buyers is perfectly reasonable. Be that back to the manufacturer or some other third party business that will remanufacture them into other products.
Why would bob recycle them when there is a market that wants used cells that they could sell into? That’s the purpose of breakers at the end of the day, strip off what’s useful, sell it and crush the rest.
Soldato
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There is a place in NL that is creating containerised storage from them. They use the cells from the heavily degraded packs, their main business is swapping out the oldest leaf packs for the newer ones.
Many of the viable packs end up in custom areas right now, such as EV conversions of classics, eg Arnie having his hummer EV'd
I cant find the article now but IIRC it was based on a P100
Arnold Schwarzenegger Owned the First Gas and Electric Hummers
What some may not know is that both the Hummer and Schwarzenegger have a unique bond. Both are famous for being behemoths in their respective spaces.
www.motorbiscuit.com
Soldato
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Not a leaf but I’m not sure the specific car is relevant.
A second life for batteries: from energy usage to industrial storage
Connected Energy, a specialist in award-winning energy storage solutions that give a second life to electric vehicle batteries, has ordered comissioned its largest ever second-life battery energy storage system, the E-STOR.
Renault installs electric car charging stations powered by used EV battery packs
Renault technically owns a lot of electric car battery packs thanks to its Zoe program under which they sell the...
I’m pretty sure a coal plant in Germany has a huge battery bank connected to it made from used BMW i3 cells but I can’t find the link.
You should also consider that in reality, the volume of second hand batteries actually entering the market is quite small as they have only been on the roads for 12 years. Nearly all of them are from crashed cars rather than being at end of their useful automotive life.
I see what you are saying, i really do but....
Do they ring you up regarding your Autotrader advert selling a car then? Nope : The world doesnt work like Kryton suggests it does.
The key difference being that a third party business would potentially be interested in the Renault group calling them up and saying "We've looked at our battery lease data and we predict between 400 and 500 60kWh Zoe batteries at between 70% and 75% being available in 3 months time, are you interested?"
I'm not so sure they'd be as interested in "Alright mate, I've got a 130000 mile Nissan Leaf, an i3, two Model 3's one long range one standard and a crash damaged i-Pace, you ineterested?"
Unless you are saying there will be another whole level of industry that acquires, transports, tests, categorises and stores these cells before supplying them in meaningful quantities to third party manufacturers. If so that is a whole other industry that doesn't even exist yet.
But the use of a 10+ old car isn’t buying it to sell to Bob the scrap man who then sells it on to someone else. If a car does hit end of life due to a crash then the end consumer doesn’t really get involved. Much like when a car goes to Bob now and he strips it and sells the valuable parts.
It does exist, just at a very small scale to match the handful of EVs that are crashed off the roads at the moment.
At the end of the day, it will have to exist because bobs breakers isn’t equipped to deal with li-ion batteries. They’ll have to remove it and dispose of it another way as they do now. That means either selling it to someone else or becoming a battery recycler themselves.
Sure it’s tiny in terms of scale now but come 2050, bobs breakers U.K. Ltd will be potentially be dealing with millions of packs per year.
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Is Bob on eToro?I don't deny that for a second but there is a big difference between "dispose" or "recycle" and the concept of the battery having a "second life" in it's current form.
I'm sure some will have a second life but as soon as EV's hit end of life in vast quantities the batteries are just going to become another problem that needs to be dealt with as cheaply as possible which will inevitably be through controlled disposal or recycling.
Averaged across a year the average scrap yard in the UK deals with 2 cars a day! Lets say they deal with 1000 cars in a year they will be dealing with so many different battery packs and capacities they'd struggle to supply 50 identical ones over the course of a year. No business is going to be interested in using them directly beyond the classic EV converters (a niche market at best) and the home brew storage projects (even more niche!).
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Soldato
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I don't deny that for a second but there is a big difference between "dispose" or "recycle" and the concept of the battery having a "second life" in it's current form.
I'm sure some will have a second life but as soon as EV's hit end of life in vast quantities the batteries are just going to become another problem that needs to be dealt with as cheaply as possible which will inevitably be through controlled disposal or recycling.
Industry will change.
It wont be bobs auto breakers in the same way as it is now.
Its worse as they are less bolt in now and more integrated.
IMO they should be forced when designing to take account of recycling.
Its a shame since replaceable battery packs as a technology has some nice advantages (such as in theory hotswapping for ore range) and far easier to recycle a specific pack which connects/disconnects easily from the vehicle.
But the negatives right now win out.
A lot will depend on how easy it to get the cells individually out as opposed to a pack that is sealed and difficult to get the cells out of.
Bear in mind though that breakers now just do that, they break it down into various components. Many then head off to different places for further processing, it would likely be the same with cells. They would come out in various states of packaging that then went off for more specialised processing.
Soldato
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The recyclability is considered which is why everyone is amazed at the Tesla 4680 pack that fully glued and bonded into the pack, the only place they are going is the shredder to then recover the material back at constitutional parts.
JB strauss and his Redwood company are gearing up for this exact model I guess.
Leaf cells are now making their way into Honda Insights
JB strauss and his Redwood company are gearing up for this exact model I guess.
Leaf cells are now making their way into Honda Insights
Absolutely. The point I'm making is that as great as it is to show a 20ft shipping container packed with 24 identical Kangoo Z.E batteries still owned by the OEM under a battery lease scheme, a model that has now been scrapped by almost every manufacturer, it isn't a particularly repeatable business model.
If Nio were to gain traction with their battery swapping stations then they have the ideal mechanism to offload their batteries that are no longer deemed suitable for car use. In fact they could factor in the obsolescence and be able to up the throughput if required by raising the threshold (say from 80% SOC to 85%) if the demand for second life packs increased and vice versa. Unfortunately (or not depending on your stance) the industry hasn't adopted that model so you'd have to believe that despite the investment even Nio will move away from it as time goes on.
Recycling and/or reclamation of raw materials from the cells is going to be a key area either from an environmental standpoint or an economic one.