Description of need
Electric vehicles represent an emerging challenge / opportunity for the car recycling industry:as a car dismantler, what am I going to do with all these EoL electric vehicles?
In particular, producers of specialty steel or aluminum alloys are not keen to receive their alloys back after use UNLESS their alloys are not mixed with other alloys. That UNLESS is virtually impossible to satisfy in the real world, due to product design, long-use phases, and the inability to aggregate individual alloys at scale in an economically efficient manner.
There are tons of different form factors, car architectures, etc. Everything that comes into the car is different. EVs have a lot of specialty alloys (e.g. high strength steel), but these alloy producers are not interested in collecting secondary material from EoL EVs.
David Wagger adds:
At least to date, EVs have massive traction batteries, and the rest of the EV has been designed around them, whether for light-weighting or other objectives. The composition of EVs is likely to diverge from the historic composition of ICEs. Argonne’s GREET Model has the best freely available data on vehicle composition. However, even ICEs have very diverse steel and aluminum chemistries within the same vehicle.
Problem severity (1-10)
8
Who has this need
Car dismantlers
Total addressable market (TAM)
Unknown ($10B?)
Solutions today, and their shortcomings
Unknown
Potentially relevant capabilities
Unknown
References
- 2024-11-15 David Wagger (ReMA)
- Argonne’s GREET Model has the best freely available data on vehicle composition.