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Burning Gas Pollutes So Much, Dirty EV Battery Manufacturing Evens Out In About 2 Years
(www.jalopnik.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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I wish they weren’t so expensive though.
IMO the biggest incentive of all is that the battery exists for the life of the vehicle and can be recycled at the end (the lithium inside does not disappear!), vs the gas which is literally burning money away.
They are getting a lot cheaper overall. The EV Bolt is less than $4k more than a Camry. In expensive places like California, or with gas as high as it is, you can quickly make back that additional cost and get ahead over time, especially if you are able to charge from home. And TBH the Bolt isn't that bad of a car, and get's great distance per charge.
That and there's only so much gas, once we burn it all up it'll take millions of years to replenish. Yea, you could say the same about battery materials, but those get reused for what a decade before they start to degrade? And the actual energy is free once we have the means to harvest it (wind, solar etc are all "free" infinite energy so long as we have the panels and turbines)
“Degrade” doesn’t mean “dead”. Once a battery pack has lost sufficient capacity to run your car, it will still have a ton of capacity for other applications. If you’re setting up some grid-scale battery storage, if you can get used packs cheaply enough why would you care that they only hold 70% of a charge? If you can buy two (or more) for the price of a single new battery pack you’re coming out way, way ahead.
And even if you then run those until they only hold 20% charge, it’s likely not all of the individual pack cells are evenly holding charge — some are likely going to be much better than others. So you can remove the “better” cells and reuse those in other applications. At once point in Japan Nissan was selling home power packs from reclaimed Leaf cells from “dead” battery packs.
It’s only once the cells get so bad they can’t be used anymore that you have to worry about recycling them. At that point recycling will likely become a closed loop (as it is with lead for lead acid batteries) — you no longer have to mine more lithium, as the cheapest source of lithium will be from dead cells.
We will eventually get to a virtuous cycle with these cells, but it’s going to take quite a while. Most of the EV cells manufactured to date are still in cars on the road. I wouldn’t expect to see significant recycling until maybe 2035 or 2040 at the current rate.
Those are great points! My co worker had a beater prius he bought for 500 bucks a while ago, "dead battery". He opened up the pack and found 1 or 2 bad cells, replaced them and had a sick commuter! (Granted it looked like previous owners slid cardboard boxes on every flat surface and paint was thrashed) He drove it for years before selling it. Goes to show how far a little elbow grease will go. Believe the previous owner was trading it in because of high cost of replacement pack since a lot of people couldn't be bothered to open them up! I had not thought about using degraded packs as home storage, that's an excellent idea. One of these days I want to set up some solar and a battery bank to reduce my grid dependency, and as a bonus have power if we loose grid in a storm. I actually just had a few days of no power due to a rare tornado around here ...
Umm, AFAIK, we actually can't make more oil, so there isn't going to be any more gas, just work harder to find what's left. We absolutely should be moving to alternative energies to power civilization.
When I say millions of years I mean the plankton and our decomposing bodies will eventually make some oil, but by then our planet will be gone anyways lol. I'm sure human civilization won't make it to see any more oil produced
Pretty sure the conditions on the planet when oil/coal formed were substantially different from today. In particular, there are now various organisms which feed on the decaying matter that's at the start of that process. These organisms eat that matter and emit CO2 as they live and breathe, returning the carbon to the air instead of burying underground.
Isn't lithium infinitely recyclable?
I have heard that! But it's on the consumers to ensure they get the old packs to a place that can recycle them. Just like with existing car parts I imagine the suppliers could put a big core charge on replacement battery packs to ensure the old ones are returned for remanufacture.
I don’t think that’s even a concern. Current cars are already one of the most recycled products and that has barely anything to do with customers. There has to be incentive for the “final purchaser”, the junker