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Comment by adgjlsfhk1 | Hacker News Reader

This article seems to be making a few pretty big mistakes. First of all is the 5% of batteries are recycled figure. The first problem with this is that it's unclear if that is accounting for capacity or not. Recycling a 100kWh battery in a car matters a lot more than a 2500mAh battery from a phone. Also, it doesn't account for the amount of batteries that are re-used. Batteries that have lost 25% of their maximum capacity is probably no longer useful in a car, but still fine for grid storage, where price matters a lot more than volume or weight. Recycling a battery is really stupid if it can be reused, so I'm really disappointed that this article didn't mention battery reuse at all.

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It's not a pretty big mistake, it is very intentionally trying to create drama as if this was somehow an unsolved problem threatening Humanity only to then conclude that EV batteries are both heavily regulated and economically valuable.

It's just a fluff tech piece like most mainstream tech reporting.

Seems like valid concerns to me. Who is taking the batteries and putting them into grids? Do we reach a limit and then what if there’s no market to buy them? If the world is going to change over to EVs, that’s a big scale of a problem that needs to be thought through or bad things will happen.

If there was nobody left to buy used batteries for storage, then there would still be plenty of recyclers looking to buy them.

And the people who bought a 25% worn battery for storage would be looking for another new one at some point, at which time they will sell the old one off for recycling.

So a time and resource intensive process for recycling giant heavy objects that can explode will be effective in every country of the planet at the scale of every car?

I’m not saying it couldn’t be true, but I’m quite skeptical…

There's already Li-Cycle and Redwood Materials. No obvious reason why they couldn't scale.

Reuse like this can extend the useful life of the battery, but not forever. So sooner or later they will need to be recycled anyhow. Accordingly, I don’t think we need to worry about the market for used batteries drying up.

The problem with the "used EV battery market" is that the damn EV batteries are lasting longer than anyone expected.

So there are no batteries to develop an actual industry around, most are just one-offs.

Nissan created a PowerWall-like division for the secondary market. That division made a commitment to only ever use secondary use batteries. (Unlike PowerWall which has yet to build one from secondary use batteries. They use fresh manufactured batteries.)

Nissan's early Leafs have the reputation as the cars with the most degraded batteries coming back into the used car market, and some of Nissan's earliest Leafs were sold under a "battery leasing model" where the car was sold but the battery was still under lease from Nissan giving Nissan incentive to replace the battery if it dropped below certain warranty thresholds. Yet despite the "notorious degraded Leaf battery" and decades of the Leafs existence and batteries that possibly owners could call in lease terms for replacements out there, statistics show that the vast majority of Leaf batteries are still in primary usage (people are still driving those "degraded" batteries, there is a used car market for them) and Nissan claims they've yet to see enough batteries enter the secondary use market to build even a single one of their PowerWall-equivalent products.

I wonder how many households realized they didn't need all that range after all since they have a second ICE car anyways. So the Leaf pretty much stays in a 30 miles radius of the house.

From my own anecdotal evidence I think a lot of people absolutely underestimate the impact of home charging (even at "trickle" Level 1 in the US) versus "range anxiety". In the nearly a decade I've had my PHEV, two of my three daily commutes I could and did entirely every day on the range I can Level 1 trickle charge entirely at home overnight.

People massively over-estimate the range they think they need because they don't take things like home charging into account.

Exactly this.

From a regular European 230V outlet you can get 100km of range every night easily. Even more if you don't work 16 hour days.

The average commute around here is a bit over 50km a day, both ways combined.

> Who is taking the batteries and putting them into grids?

Right now, hobbyists. There's high demand for used Leaf modules - so much so that they're getting fairly difficult to find these days. Golf cart conversions are popular and easy.

Which doesn’t sound like much of a plan once the entire worlds cars contain giant batteries.

There isn't enough supply to support commercial versions yet. When there is, expect budget powerwalls. Used batteries would be perfect since home backup rarely sees full discharge.

This is a problem the market is perfectly capable of solving. Batteries are valuable.

> create drama as if this was somehow an unsolved problem threatening Humanity

The number one issue people around me have when talking about EVs isn't even range or cold these days, it's that they read somewhere batteries aren't recycled, together with some total cost back of the envelope calculation that showed an EV pollutes at least as much as a fossil fuel vehicle. Some of them are convinced hydrogen and fuel cells are the only way forward.

Now, I try to formulate rebuttals based on my engineering knowledge, but I tried to do my homework and could not find reliable information.

My hunch is EV is a young, rapidly scaling product class/industry/market (compared to entrenched fossil fuel engines) so the process has to scale up to be cost efficient and even work at all, it just can't happen overnight, but that no, they're not going to throw batteries in landfills.

My second hunch is that those otherwise green-biased, reasonable people get strangely irate about the thing to the point of persisting with buying ICEs so I'm thinking there's some agenda carried through memetic manipulative propaganda somewhere around it.

> Batteries that have lost 25% of their maximum capacity is probably no longer useful in a car

Here in NZ people are importing "cheap" used Nissan Leafs from Japan with 75% battery remaining.

Here a 5 year old, 60,000km Leaf, with 76% battery remaining sells for around US$13,000.

This. Also, if the capacity drops enough that the range really isn’t useful to you (and you can’t sell it on to anyone else who has lower range needs), just park it up in your garage or driveway and wire it back in to your mains electricity.

No blackouts ever again and half-rate electricity on nighttime tarriffs. Bargain.

Bonus quest: make a simple conversion kit to do this.

If it's a Leaf, losing 25% of the range may make the battery no longer useful, because the Leaf's range is just barely adequate for many people.

If it's a Tesla with a 300+ mile range, assuming the owner has a home charger, the difference in range really only matters on long road trips, and 225 miles is still adequate to drive long distances, albeit more slowly. The owner is not likely to replace the pack at this level of degradation.

Bullshit - I live in NZ, we've bought one of those 2nd hand Japanese Leafs, ours was at ~80% which gives us roughly a 100km range if charged 100% (we charge to 80%, which is better for the battery, besides we live on top of a hill) - it's a great around town car, what we bought it for, we've never run out of charge, always slow charge at home for cents compared with the other car (a Prius)

I am the OP, can you send me an email, my address is in my profile, I would like to ask you some questions about your car.

Like I said, it “may make the battery no longer useful, because the Leaf's range is just barely adequate for many people.”

Great for you if it works in your circumstances. For others it doesn’t and I don’t see what the need for the hostility is. Not everyone is exactly like you.

does anyone have knowledge of whether, once a battery starts losing capacity, does it do so in accelerating speed? My experiences with laptop and phone batteries suggest that they do. It took a couple of years for batteries to be reduced to 85% capacity, but from there it took only half a year for them to diminish to 60% or 50%.

Yep: https://electrek.co/2020/06/06/tesla-battery-degradation-rep...

"Real-world data showed that Tesla battery degradation was less than 10% after over 160,000 miles (257,500 km)"

According to the graph there's a slight dip during the first 50k and then it levels out to a steady decline. There is no data for batteries around 60% capacity, since there are none yet :)

I have some done some tests on 2900mAh Samsung cells from 2008. I have tested about 50 cells so far that were pretty abused, meaning they were discharged to less than 2.2V for several months. This is very bad as their normal operating range is 4.2-3.2V if you are really pushing them.

About half of the cells are effectively dead, internal shorts or electrolyte leaks. Included in this half are cells with mA discharge currents which is very out of spec. Not suitable for use.

The other half lived with an average capacity of 2050mAh with a std deviation of 150mAh. This is only a degradation of about 30% which was pretty surprising to me.

If you leave a lithium ion battery pack at a low level of charge for a long time, it will kill it. If you don't, it won't.

My numbers almost exactly match yours. I’ve been using “Coconut Battery” for about fifteen years to track this on various MacBooks.

The death spiral starts at 80%. Newer Macs and iPhones now get pretty aggressive about pushing users to seek service.

Also worth noting that, as of Big Sur, MacBooks that are mostly used plugged-in will not too off past 80% until asked. I expect that this will pay off bigly for consumers.

Same here. Even just looking at the title, I wondered when would a battery be considered 'dead'. There is no description of this in the whole article.

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