A question which has just been posed to me is, how long does the battery last and what happens to its dangerous remains when cast aside?
Just wondering.
Batteries are often quoted as lasting 10 years or 200,000 miles based on existing technology. My hybrid car battery lasted 12 years and was still testing as perfect.
Most of an EV battery is recyclable
10 years? Both my cars are older than that (19 and 12 years respectively) and neither needs a new engine, also, when I was doing my work with the dogs I was doing that mileage in 4 years. My Berlingo has done getting on for half a million kms, the Partner not far behind at 320,000. That makes EVs even more unaffordable and unrealistic from a sustainability point of view.
Most? How much, and how, and what is done with what’s left?
No it doesn’t. I said “Batteries are often quoted as lasting 10 years or 200,000 miles based on existing technology”. I then quoted my personal example of a 12 year old EV style battery that was still going strong 12 years later despite an original life span estimate of 7 years. Modern batteries have developed and are developing at an astonishing rate. The batteries I am currently using have not been going long enough to test their actual lifespan. Manufacturers quote a very conservative estimate to avoid getting sued.
I appreciate your financial position and stage of life but surely even you can see that we cannot afford to keep poisoning our environment at the expense of future generations. If you can’t make a physical contribution to saving the planet at least you could give some support to those who are trying to.
The plastic casings are difficult to recycle but then so are most of the plastics found elsewhere on any car.
Liquid electrolyte is also difficult to recycle at the moment but the move to solid state batteries should take care of that.
How will you recycle your cars?
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No arguement on that score, the unknown is whether EVs are the answer or not. At the moment as far as I am concerned, the jury is still out.
As far as my own cars’ recyling is concerned, I don’t know, how is yours going to be recycled? Presumably the metal content is crushed and re-used and as to the rest, who knows.? Do you?
If I was younger and richer I am not sure I would feel any differently though.
EV batteries once no longer efficient to be used in cars are reused for other purposes, e.g. for “stationary storage” for renewable energy and for use in homes, offices, factories, etc… before they are recycled.
The initial 10 years figure that was quoted has been proven to have been very pessimistic, as @Mik_Bennett said. That was first the earlier generations which have been vastly improved upon since. And solid state batteries should be even more efficient once they’re ready for mass market.
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So we all fiddle while Rome burns?
Ah a belief level concern. I would bet you only feel that way having grown up with ICE vehicles. It would be wonderful if usable electric had been around for 100 years and suddenly they dicovered oil under ground and asked everyone to change to a more polluting less efficient vehicle with lots of maintenane issues and you also had to drive miles to fill it with fuel when you got used to re fuelling at home?
There are battery recycling plants that recover all the valuable materials laying pretty much idle as batteries are lasting much longer than first thought.
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Nobody fiddled while Rome burned, not even Nero, but if he had and all he had to fiddle with was a bucket of diesel, would you advocate he throws that on it simply because you can’t be sure of the outcome.?
Diesel would extinguish the flames of Rome unless squeezed to its combustion point 
Just saying.
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Fiddle while Rome burns
idiom
to enjoy yourself or continue working as normal and not give any attention to something important and unpleasant that is happening that you should be taking action to prevent:
Source: Cambridge English Dictionary
Well at least if things producing electric power go up it will be in one big bang. Possibly one very big one over a wide area and maybe for millenia.
There’s always pros and cons.
What ! That will certainly decrease performance. Carbon monoxide converts haemoglobin to carboxyhaemoglobin, blocking oxygen uptake in the blood. It kills. Stone dead.
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Crikey, so they’re starving their body of oxygen using CO in order to simulate being at higher altitude for training. That sounds to me to be a very dangerous practice. Although COHaem is eliminated very quickly from the body, a residual amount stays in the bloodstream for quite a while. I assume they have doctors taking regular blood samples to check.
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I keep being told that electric cars are too expensive compared ICEs so I knocked up a simple spreadsheet to compare costs depending on the various variables. It is interesting to change the variables to see the effect.
I based the info on my existing Kona electric and compared it to the equivalent petrol version. (I have ignored the €5000 grant from the French government for going electric and the €1500 discount offered by Hyundai just for asking).
I get 6.7 Km per KWh (this figure continually varies depending on my driving style)
I pay €0.20 per KWh for electricity (I use heures creuse almost exclusively but to buy publicly, electricity can cost from zero KWh in supermarkets to €0.60 KWh using fast Autoroute chargers.
I have used a combined 13.6 kpl quoted for a petrol version on Hyundai website
I have used a cost of €0.87 per litre for petrol.
Depending on the miles done in the lifetime of the car I can work out the real difference between owning electric or petrol.
If I say the car only does 100,000 miles in its life time the costs of ownership between the two is roughly equal. I have not taken into account resale costs.
What I am struggling with are the maintenance costs. Obviously an EV has no cooling system, clutch, exhaust system or gearbox to go wrong plus it has a lot fewer moving parts. So I am guessing that would make an EV cheaper to service. As the title of this thread suggests – things are changing fast but in the EV direction.
For an electric vehicle advocate, you are very far behind the times! 
Yes, he seems to have missed a 1 at the front
If you re-do that with UK prices (25p** or so per kWh or 0,29€) you might not find the comparison so favourable.
** - it’s infuriating that it seems almost impossible to find out what kWh prices are in the UK without actually signing up to a tariff, talk about opaque marketing.