>In Oklahoma City, the batteries in the SNT warehouse mostly came from cars that are still under warranty, which means the automakers are responsible for them. Tyler Helps, the company’s head of business development, says automakers are paying SNT to keep their old batteries because they don’t know what the used battery market is going to look like and whether the materials inside the battery might be more valuable in the future. “So instead of the automakers saying, ‘I'm going to go and dispose of those materials,’ they say, ‘I’m just going to hold onto it,’” he says.
I am not convinced of the analysis, it is more likely that the car makers know that the cost of disposing properly (and in large volumes) such batteries today would be astronomical (let's say - only for the sake of reasoning - US$ 2,000 per car) and prefer to pay (say) US$ 50/year to SNT and postpone the problem by - still say - 10 or 20 years (and most probably they already charged you, inside the price of your new electric vehicle, some US$ 3,000, to stay on the safe side)
In a nutshell, you don't want right now to actually own an electric car past its warranty, you'd be better served by long renting or similar, as there is a concrete risk that if/when your batteries die, there won't be (yet) an effective way to get rid of them cleanly and you may have to pay a non-trivial amount of money for disposing of the battery.
Additionally, it seems to me like this opens a (large) can of worms when it comes to used vehicles.
Will there be specialized technicians/organizations that will give you some form of warranty on the batteries?