That is ugly, at least in the US the car manufactures are under no obligation to provide parts beyond the warantee period, but they generally do, because its very profitable. That said, I tend to drive the wheels off my cars, but since my first, I've tended to buy very popular models, meaning that there is a nearly unlimited supply of junkyard parts. I would expect that is a partial solution to their problem. A wrecked car probably has a fine battery if it wasn't damaged in the wreck. That is the usual answer even with ICE cars because sh*t happens to them too, blown engine/transmission/whatever can easily exceed the purchase price/value of the car.

OTOH, there are probably various borderline amoral ways to deal with the problem by shifting it somewhere else.

Except that engines and transmissions almost never cost as much to repair or even replace as batteries (which are getting more and more expensive over time as supply chain and materials shortages increase). They are also repairable by more people, including the actual vehicle owner.

That is largely though because people aren't buying new engines/transmissions from the manufacture when they fail. Instead there is a robust remanufacturing industry which takes the old broken ones, and basically repairs them and sells them back through the auto parts supply chains.

So, while its true a new battery pack costs a small fortune, most of them probably aren't completely useless when they fail. If car packs are anything like power tool packs, old laptop packs, and the like then they generally go "bad" when a cell or two get far enough out of spec that its not safe to charge/discharge them as a pack because the charge controllers aren't fine grained enough to manage each cell individually beyond monitoring. The internet are full of DYI projects where people collected packs with 18650 batteries, tore them out, quantified them, and then rebuilt them into packs with matching cells.

I'm betting this holds true even for car packs not using a battery standard like the 18650s. Given a pile of back packs, they could be torn apart, the cells rematched, and then rebuilt into remanufactured packs. Sure they won't be 120% or whatever over their original capacity like the new ones, but a battery pack with 85% of its capacity sold for 1/8th of the price of a new one will likely have a market.

BTW: Couple years ago when I was in yellowstone, Toyota had a big plaque on one of the visitor centers about how they were reusing prius batteries for solar backup.

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1098326_used-toyota-hyb...

So, even when they are at 50%/etc of their capacity they have a use in stationary applications.

I think it is a pretty bad sign when the cost of replacing a part is higher than the cost of the whole thing.

I suspect this will continue to be true for any used EV whose MSRP (i.e. brand new price) is under $30k. If true, then EVs are the vehicle equivalent of single-use plastics.