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Cake day: August 15th, 2024

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  • Maybe, but that isn’t clear. Like I said, I don’t have fuel source statistics, even though that is important. I suspect it is too early to gather those statistics.

    The Prius has some battery replacement, but my impression is most of them the battery lasts for life, only in a few cases is it seen as worth it to replace a battery (or just a dead cell?). EVs have not been around long enough to really develop this industry - if it ever will develop.

    The leaf is an outlier - their battery management system was poor and it killed the battery in ways that nearly every other make avoids. The leaf sold in enough numbers, long enough ago, that I’d expect to see an industry to replace the battery if one will happen and it doesn’t seem to be as large as one should expect. This is a sign of something - but what it is too early to tell.


  • I suspect he is wrong - the average car is 12 year old, which means there are a lot of cars older than 24 years old still on the road. Of course cars do wear out and get scrapped, but just looking at broad statistics we should expect most EVs made since 2002 (after the EV1) are still on the road (this is broad statistics which doesn’t consider fuel source at all - even though it is an important consideration I don’t have data!) Which is to say there is no reason to think there are large numbers of batteries ready to be recycled. The first EVs are only now entering the phase where they are going to start getting scrapped - and there were not a lot of any of them made.

    There likely is a good business to be made recycling used car batteries. However if you want to get into it now is not the time to expand/scale , now is still time to be designing and testing the machines and processes you will be using when you scale. Anyone in this business should expect to still be losing many - your business plan should have real data showing real data of when you expect cars to be scrapped in numbers large enough to be wroth scaling.
















  • Maybe. The average driver is spending just under $200 per month now on gas (14000 miles per year at 20mpg, gas $3/gallon - you can adjust numbers as you want, these are reasonable but some cars better fuel ecconomy) if you drive more than average it is possible to make payments on fuel savings in some cases.

    or in my case the old car was going to be replaced anyway. Paymets were a given, so saving over $100 a month in fuel was a nice bonus. There are a lot of people who are buying something different anyway who care about their budget.