Opinion

Tom Carr is managing director at automotive consultancy PHM Group, which helps retailers and global car makers across all elements of vehicle sales. Here, he explains how car retailers can empower customers to switch to EVs 

Dr Sara Ridley, engineering and quality director at Autocraft EV Solutions, explains how EV battery remanufacturing can unlock significant environmental benefits for OEMs

The automotive industry is on a fast track to radically reduce its environmental footprint. Electric vehicles (EVs) will play an important role within this transition and are seen by many as the future of mobility, providing a sustainable alternative to ICE vehicles by eliminating tailpipe emissions during operation.

While this is undoubtedly a positive, focusing only on operational emissions ignores the lifecycle impact of EVs. For electrification to be truly sustainable, we will need to see a significant reduction in emissions throughout the lifecycle – and beyond. This has caused many automakers to focus on recycling as a means to extract additional value from end of life EV batteries. Although automotive OEMs have a duty to fulfil their whole life obligations, they risk missing out on greater environmental savings by overlooking the possibilities of EV battery repair and remanufacturing.

The importance of EV battery longevity

Given the well documented environmental cost of producing EV batteries, we have a duty to ensure they remain in use for as long as possible. Each individual cell is valuable, making it essential for the industry to extract maximum value from them. Unfortunately, countless EV batteries are going to waste due to premature recycling.

When EV battery faults occur, the fault is typically located within only a small group of cells. In the same way that a chain is as strong as its weakest link, a battery will only perform to the level of its weakest performing cell. A small number of failed cells can have a catastrophic impact on overall battery performance leading to apparent failure, despite the vast majority of the remaining cells being perfectly healthy. This amounts to an enormous wasted opportunity from an environmental perspective.

An EV battery with a short lifespan is unsustainable. Batteries must remain in use beyond the carbon break-even point, the point in time or distance driven at which the total carbon emissions produced by an electric vehicle become equal to or less than those produced by a comparable ICE vehicle, to be viable. Although it varies between vehicles, average estimates put this figure at about 50,000km. The longer they remain in use past this point, the greater the environmental benefit.

Through our pioneering battery testing and repair capability, we can now rapidly diagnose faulty cells and replace them with healthy ones to restore optimal performance and range – a process known as EV battery remanufacturing. Tackling the risk of premature EV battery degradation provides enormous environmental advantages while also building consumer confidence in EV, both of which will determine the success of electric vehicles.

Recycling – a last resort, not a first step

To be clear, Autocraft is absolutely in favour of EV battery recycling once every possible effort has been made to maximise the lifespan of battery packs. Whether through remanufacturing, or eventually, re-use in second-life applications, this ensures that maximum value is derived to justify the environmental cost of producing them. The challenge is when batteries are recycled before this point.

According to the waste management hierarchy framework, proactively preventing waste is far better for the environment. While few would disagree with this idea, recycling receives a great deal more attention within the automotive industry. Many automakers, still unaware of how to safely and effectively repair battery packs, continually default to recycling as the easiest way to fulfil their legal responsibilities. This short-term focus on compliance distracts them from the more pressing goal of tackling their ecological footprint, since it causes them to prematurely dispose of batteries before their full environmental value can be achieved.

The hidden environmental impact of recycling processes should not be overlooked, neither should the fact that most of recycled battery packs goe into black mass, which is used for building roads. These factors make it all the more critical that recycling becomes a last resort, only once all options to repair and re-use have been exhausted.

The potential of remanufacturing for OEMs

The tendency to prioritise recycling can be explained by the historic limitations of testing, repair and remanufacturing processes. While the technology has since come a very long way, awareness levels about what can be achieved through remanufacturing are stubbornly low. For the EV industry to thrive, this needs to change.

Our expertise in testing allows us to identify the healthy cells from failed packs and re-use them to remanufacture an underperforming pack, ensuring that no cell is ever wasted. This process incurs a fraction of the environmental cost of producing a new replacement pack while insulating them from the reputational impact of reliability issues. For vehicle users, this also mitigates the perceived risk of EV battery decline, which could play a massive role in boosting confidence in electric vehicles, particularly for ones outside of the warranty period.

A major (yet overlooked) opportunity for EV success

Through electrification, the automotive industry has a huge opportunity to deliver clean and sustainable forms of transport. Simply producing EV batteries alone is not enough, we need to ensure that cell remains in use for as long as possible and that recycling is only seen as a last resort. When the automotive industry grasps the importance of this shift, it will be able to truly unlock the ecological benefits of electric and instil the confidence necessary for widespread EV adoption.

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