Batteries are now at the core of car buying decisions

All that is a lot to cover, for the OEM putting it in its cars, the retailer selling it as part of the package, the media testing it and the consumer trying to understand it. But it’s essential the entire industry gets to grip with the storytelling for batteries, because there are an awful lot of them on our roads, with millions more to come before the decade is out. 

A brief dive into global EV numbers shows a forecast for more than 53 million EVs on the roads next year, according to EV Battery Solutions, which provides the care package, as it were, for OEMs, by carrying out in-life health checks as well as facilitating repairs, reuse and recycling of the batteries. 

Annual EV sales globally reached 10.5million in 2022, which was a 60 per cent increase year on year. The market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 17.2 per cent between now and 2028, so it doesn't take a mathematician to see how quickly and comprehensively battery manufacture is growing.

Crucially, that means a forecast of 11million to 13million batteries requiring repair or replacement in the next five years, based on current degradation and failure rates, according to EV Battery Solutions. That’s in addition to all the batteries happily powering their cars on the roads, which nonetheless need maintenance, health checks, diagnostics and health certificates.

Keeping EV batteries happy keeps consumers happy: no one likes their car causing them issues or costing them money, but drivers also want to know the state of the battery before they buy the car (given about 70 per cent of us buy used): they want to know how old it is, how much of its performance it still has, and an increasing number want to know what happens if the car is in a crash  – will the whole thing have to be written off?

Buyers also want to know whether their car battery is full of cobalt from child labour in the DRC, or lithium mined in a way that has polluted the soil and waterways in the poor country it was sourced from. They want to know if their battery is liable to catch fire (for a staggering 40 per cent of consumers, this would put them off buying an EV according to recent Auto Trader data, even though all the evidence from the national fire services in Scandinavia and the UK shows EVs catch fire far less than petrol and diesel engines do).

Drivers have also heard that lithium-ion batteries are on the way out anyway, and have heard about solid-state batteries, or even alternative power sources such hydrogen and synthetic fuels (we won’t delve into those: the short answer is that these are not viable alternatives for passenger cars in the UK for the mass market within the next decade, so let’s move on).

To address the panoply of consumer concerns, and get the market shifting again (company fleets are still buying new EVs, but private retail sales have almost halted in the UK), OEMs and retailers have to pool their resources to create a simple cradle-to-grave timeline of an electric car that should display in showrooms and online.

It has to start with the gathering of all the raw materials, from manganese to lithium, cobalt, nickel, aluminium and the water and energy supplies needed, too. It has to show that lithium is coming largely from Australia, Argentina, Chile and China, but that the UK is opening up water and rock reserves, as are many other countries, in an effort to on-shore production. 

The narrative should also show that cobalt mined for cars is below 10 per cent of total cobalt mined, with the rest going into products we’ve never blanched about before. It also needs to give a glimpse into solid-state battery technology, and other developments that will reduce rare-earth metals and increase the efficiency of the batteries, so less raw material and manufacture is needed, bringing down costs and increasing range simultaneously.

Next, it should show the huge reductions in energy used by plants that do the processing of sulphates, and the manufacture of battery cells, and how, within the manufacture, technicians are finding new ways to bond the cells so that they can be disassembled for recycling easily.

Then the timeline should move on, to show motorists driving their EVs around, alongside the notable fact that the average EV battery has a lifespan of 8-15 years: compare that with the average lifespan of an engine. Furthermore, current data from EV Battery Solutions shows that around just five to 10 per cent of batteries have been written off due to accidents or malfunctions.

Around 50 per cent of those failed batteries are recycled or repurposed globally, but recycling rates will soar as regulations become stricter around the world, which they will if nations have any hope of reaching carbon-reduction targets. 

As for EVs catching fire, the likelihood stands at 0.03 per cent of those on the road, according to Autoinsurance EZ.

Finally, the timeline for consumers should move to the great battery afterlife, where there are two options: recycle or reuse (unlike engines). EV Battery Solutions estimates that by 2030, 80-85 per cent of all batteries will be recycled or reused. Furthermore, there is widespread acceptance in the automotive industry that by 2040 we won’t need to mine any more lithium, because there will be a closed-loop manufacturing process in place, where the current lithium recycles almost infinitely – up to 90 per cent of the element can be recycled (for cobalt and nickel it’s 95 per cent).

With such a highly efficient recycling process in place, over 90 per cent of new EV batteries could be made from recycled material in a decade, according to European Commission EV Battery Recycling Report stats. 

None of this is very glamorous. None of it is as absorbing as talking about the noise a Ferrari V8 makes on full chat, or the 0-60mph of a Caterham, or the way a McLaren P1 hugs the road. But it’s vital consumer information; too many battery myths are stopping people going electric, and the longer we leave them to percolate, the worse the situation gets for everybody. So, let’s have the conversation now.