Life and Death of Li Ion batteries

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TheBinarySheep said:

When cars replaced horses, were they as reliable as the horse, were they easy to fix and were they affordable? I bet if PH was around at the time, there'd be the same sorts of dismissive posts. Unreliable, not cheap enough, fuelling network is terrible, it'll never take off, blah blah blah.

the process of cars replacing horses was very different.
There was no coercion, no looming ban on buying a new horse.
Also to some extent cars didn't directly preplace horses, most of what cars are used for was never done by horses.
If anything, mass car ownership was more about replacing trains, trams and buses.

It was also a slow process.
Still going on really. An awful lot of people are still involved in riding horses for leisure and sport.
Possibly more than are actually involved with motor sport?
The horse racing industry will likely outlive much of IC motor sport.

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wormus said:

That’s the point I made in an earlier post - to be adopted, new technology needs to offer something, in terms of utility, that doesn’t already exist. Cars were superior to Horses. Electric cars do nothing better in terms of utility than ICE cars. They’re more expensive, more difficult to fuel, and more expensive and they don’t go as far. Take away the P11D benefit and they don’t have a market. Government won’t force people into them as they care too much about votes and getting people into work. So either the manufacturers solve these problems or today’s EVs will be tomorrow’s Betamax video player.

I think you are quite wrong on a few points.

The government has signed up to carbon neutrality. There is no direct link between votes and unpopular policies, because a lot of those policies stay the same whoever is elected, and people just vote tribally anyway. You only have to look at the London ULEZ to understand the futility of the IC motorist arguing with the inertia of the machine.
The current EVs are a bit Betamax, in that the current crop of IC cars are a bit VHS, they sell well now, but the world will soon change and nobody will want either.

The thing about the VHS/Betamax era is that people only had to buy a few tapes and pay their TV licence. Now, those who can afford it are paying out every month for broadband, fibre, subscriptions to this that and the other. It hasn't got any cheaper!
But the masses suck it up.

I think we will see a lot of changes over the next 10 years or so, or, to some extent, we'll realise things have already changed and there's no going back.

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Evanivitch said:

Seems odd we're using cars with 10 year old technology as an indication of future technology trends.

Can we use 10 year old ICE to make the same projections?

The life of a car in the UK is typically 15 + years, so a fair number of people are living with 10 year old tech.

A lot of EVangelists seem to be disowning a big slice of the UK's current EV fleet.

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SpeckledJim said:

My EV costs about £180 a year to fuel, and doesn’t break. My previous car, a diesel S-Class, cost about £2500 to fuel. Plus £550 in tax. And let’s very generously assume this year it didn’t break.

With the £2870, I can buy some lovely treats. How’s that for extra utility?

Whoops. It broke all the time. Call it £1000.

£3870 in treats.

It will go a little way towards the depreciation or rental costs?

It looks like some EV drivers only care about the charging costs, because Daddy pays the lease.

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Mikehig said:

There are some interesting comments about the fate of EV batteries in this article:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportat...

The specialist salvage company - Synetiq - claims that there are no facilities in the UK for recycling old/damaged EV batteries so they are being stored in containers which sounds a bit risky.

The reason there's no facility for recycling such batteries is largely that there's very little supply of batteries ready for recycling.

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Mikehig said:

The article says:
"At Synetiq, the UK's largest salvage company, head of operations Michael Hill said over the last 12 months the number of EVs in the isolation bay – where they must be checked to avoid fire risk - at the firm's Doncaster yard has soared, from perhaps a dozen every three days to up to 20 per day.
"We've seen a really big shift and it's across all manufacturers," Hill said.
The UK currently has no EV battery recycling facilities, so Synetiq has to remove the batteries from written-off cars and store them in containers. Hill estimated at least 95% of the cells in the hundreds of EV battery packs - and thousands of hybrid battery packs - Synetiq has stored at Doncaster are undamaged and should be reused."
At 20 per day those hundreds of EV batteries will soon be thousands. Add in the hybrid packs and it must all add to substantial potential value in repaired packs and recovered material. Unless repair/material recovery is problematic, it's surprising that no-one has set up shop to do this.

Chicken and egg really.
Nobody is going to invest in a recycling facility until the numbers are sufficient.
20 vehicles a day is only a few thousand a year. The batteries are not hugely valuable.
You need big numbers to start up an industry.
Wages, premises, technology all cost a lot.
When it starts to look like big money, the industry will appear.
There's no point starting too small, knowing in 5 years' time you'll be obsolete.

I think we are not far from the point where it starts to make sense