It's just a fluff tech piece like most mainstream tech reporting.
So there are no batteries to develop an actual industry around, most are just one-offs.
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.
People massively over-estimate the range they think they need because they don't take things like home charging into account.
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.
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.
This is a problem the market is perfectly capable of solving. Batteries are valuable.
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.
I’m not saying it couldn’t be true, but I’m quite skeptical…
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.
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.
No blackouts ever again and half-rate electricity on nighttime tarriffs. Bargain.
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.
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.
"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 :)
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.
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.