The properties of lithium batteries are already significantly influencing the EV aftermarket – the remaining life of the traction battery can determine the price of the car and is influenced by the operating conditions of the EV by the previous owner. One of Tesla’s founders, who left the company, believes that the average lifespan of an electric vehicle traction battery is 15 years.
Image Credit: Redwood Materials
Former Tesla CTO Jeffrey Brian Stroubel, who recently founded his lithium battery recycling company, Redwood Materials interview acknowledged that an electric car with a lifespan of fifteen years is unlikely to survive until the traction batteries are replaced with new ones.
Redwood Materials now recycles batteries with a total capacity of up to 10 GWh per year, enough to produce hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles per year. In the future, the company wants to increase its production capacity in the USA tenfold and within fifteen years switch to annually recycling millions of traction batteries for electric vehicles. Ideally, by the second half of the decade, the automotive industry will need to obtain half of the raw materials for traction battery production through recycling. In the future, this proportion will approach 100 percent.
.
Add Comment