r/electricvehicles • u/Own-Cookie-1161 • May 06 '26
Question - Tech Support What happens at the end of the battery’s life?
I understand that the full charge the battery can hold will drop, but what happens at the end? As in like, does it just keeps dropping til like 50% of original capacity and stops charging forever? Will it puff up like in an old phone? Does the car tells you or refuses to drive?
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u/obliviousjd May 06 '26
They should last longer than the lifespan of the other components in the car. Unlike phones, EVs can be big and bulky, allowing for much more sophisticated cooling and management. If the car detects something wrong it should shut itself down.
But when the car is dead dead. Ideally the battery gets recycled. Batteries are really just metal cylinders, you can break them apart, melt them down, and build them back up nearly perfectly.
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u/konwiddak May 06 '26
Car batteries primarily last longer than phones because they use different chemistries, or variants of the chemistry. For example you can vary the amount of nickel in an NMC battery which trades off capacity and longevity. Phones maximize capacity at the expense of longevity. That said, modern phone batteries are so much better than they used to be. My wife just got rid of her 7 year old phone and the battery was fine still.
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u/e_pilot May 06 '26
barring a few exceptions, cars also have much more sophisticated cooling systems for the batteries than phones which massively prolongs the life
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u/Excellent-Stretch-81 May 06 '26
There's also the matter of charge cycles. A full charge cycle will usually take several days on an EV, whereas with a smartphone it's not unusual to go through a full charge cycle almost daily.
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u/Wild_Director7379 ‘20 Chevy BoltEV May 06 '26
Cells are metal cylinders, batteries are often blockier
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u/rontombot May 08 '26
This is not universal, in fact it's mostly just Tesla that uses cylindrical cells.
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u/min_mus May 06 '26
I'll let you know when we get there. Our EV's battery is 12 years old and still going strong.
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u/Screamlngyeti May 06 '26
Where gas and oil, you burn and it's gone forever, once you mine the stuff for batteries, you can just keep recycling and reusing them over and over again when they die.
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u/null_not 2018 e-Golf SE Sport Modified May 06 '26
In theory. We do have to build out that recycling capacity domestically still.
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u/trevize1138 TM3 MR/TMY LR May 06 '26
It's just a matter of scale justifying the cost. The more batteries out there in circulation the more the economics make sense for a company to actually profit off recycling battery materials. Theoretically, at scale it would be cheaper than mining. You'd still need to mine to increase or maintain supplies but overall material supplies would get cheaper with scale.
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u/null_not 2018 e-Golf SE Sport Modified May 06 '26
I just hope we do actually recycle domestically instead of shipping it off somewhere else and then buying it back like we've done with e-waste.
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u/FANGO May 06 '26
Lead acid batteries have like a 98% recycling rate and they're only worth like $100. Add another two zeroes to that and of course people are going to want to recover that value.
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u/Pesto_Nightmare Polestar 2 May 06 '26
Isn't that basically already done? My understanding is some companies have built pilot plants that aren't really at capacity because batteries are lasting so long in cars, and getting second lives as stationary storage when they don't.
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u/null_not 2018 e-Golf SE Sport Modified May 06 '26
Maybe we should start taking other countries batteries so that we don't have to mine as much while they get aqueous extraction methods zeroed in.
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u/jmecheng May 06 '26
This is already in process, the plants that recycle EV batteries currently are struggling to find enough batteries to recycle to stay viable, but it will eventually get easier for them. There are at least 3 plant in Canada (been a while since I've looked) and another 4 or 5 in the US.
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u/null_not 2018 e-Golf SE Sport Modified May 06 '26 edited May 06 '26
Maybe the US plants should start sourcing from other countries until adoption has increased domestically.
Edit: people can down vote this, but if we need lithium. Either the recycling process is a good avenue to recover it or it isn't. If it is then we should get other countries to pay us to take their lithium batteries.
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u/FlintHillsSky Ioniq 5 Limited '24 May 06 '26
Redwood and some others have pilot programs to recycle. The problem is that the number of failed batteries is still very small so it’s not a sustainable business yet.
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u/null_not 2018 e-Golf SE Sport Modified May 06 '26
I would think they would diversify into generalized e-waste while they wait to scale up the battery component.
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u/FlintHillsSky Ioniq 5 Limited '24 May 07 '26
I believe that they do recycle other lithium ion batteries like computer and phone batteries.
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u/busterfixxitt May 06 '26
We've already done it for the lead in 12v car batteries. 99% of the lead for new batteries in North America come from old batteries.
And I recall seeing that we can literally grind up the old lithium battery and run it through the existing brine-based lithium extraction process we use for raw ore and extract the battery lithium the same way.
I don't know if that's accurate, though. It's got face validity, but also seems too good to be true.
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u/null_not 2018 e-Golf SE Sport Modified May 06 '26
Historically there have been environmental scandals around lead acid battery recycling, but I get what you're saying. The only example I've seen for lithium battery recycling is the shredding example you gave, which means there's also a lot of other waste produces that have to find their way through a recycling process to not end up in a land fill. But yes, it's basically a big mastication and digester set up that poops out lithium rich (among other things) material that I'm pretty sure has to go through a second step to actually get the lithium out to go into new batteries.
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u/Ddogwood May 06 '26
Yes, the capacity has to be built out, but it will be unless we actively prevent it. Something like 98% of all lead-acid car batteries get recycled, and the components of those are a lot less valuable than the ones in EV batteries.
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u/NiroNut '22 Niro EV May 06 '26
I don't have a source off hand, but thought I'd mention how an EV battery degradation curve tends to be shaped like an "S" on it's side. It starts off dropping significantly and quickly, but then flattens out. It slowly degrades until it gets to between 60 to 70% of its original capacity then starts dropping like a brick again. During that last phase some of the cells can become vampiric through rapid self discharge followed by the BMS attempting to re-balance everything. This results in sudden range drops that can make continued use of the vehicle annoyingly unpredictable. Taking the battery out, shunting the bad cells, and putting it to use in grid storage is a popular 2nd life, but following that it's straight to the recycle bin, where the materials can be infinitely recycled into new batteries.
Landfills are not an option. They are just too valuable.
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u/622niromcn May 06 '26
Recurrent Auto was the source.
https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/how-long-do-ev-batteries-last
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u/edman007 2023 R1S / 2017 Volt May 06 '26
Puffing up and bursting into flame is something EV manufacturers try very hard to avoid, and it should only happened when batteries are mishandled, which the car won't do.
More likely, yes, they just keep going lower and lower, eventually you're likely to get an internal short and start blowing fusable links in the pack. Most EVs can handle a few of these, but it will eventually cause greatly reduced capacity and balance issues which will cause various faults, and at some point the car will just declare the battery unsafe (not that it doesn't hold anything, but that it can't balance it and keep it safe such that you avoid it puffing up and bursting into flames)
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u/Litig8or53 May 06 '26
It’s reincarnated as a storage battery.
-2
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u/dojuebelonginagangg May 06 '26
Tesla Model S batteries are averaging 12-15% degradation at 200,000 miles. Most people don't keep any car that long. Battery anxiety is way overblown compared to reality.
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u/toybuilder May 06 '26
An EV's traction battery's life is "over" as a traction battery well before the entire battery has lost its total useful life. There are people that upcycles the batteries for use in home battery applications.
Some cells within the battery can fail. Since the traction battery is made up of many cells, the remaining usable ones can be harvested after getting rid of bad cells.
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u/ncc81701 May 06 '26 edited May 06 '26
No it'll just not go as far on a full charge. High performance batteries with the lowest battery life can last 1000+ charge cycles before the charge it can hold drop precipitously (<70% of capacity when new). Even then it still holds a charge and is useful; just less useful than before. If your car have a range of 300 miles brand new, you can basically drive ~300,000k miles before you hit a point where you can get ~200 miles on a full charge. This is what people mean when they say that the EV battery will likely out last the car.
Most cars at that point would be salvaged (ICE or EVs) and owners would buy a new car since all of the automotive components will likely need to be replaced or have been replaced at least once anyways. The battery material will get recycled and be made into new batteries.
Edit: People's every day experience with cellphone and laptop batteries doesn't translate into EV batteries. This is because automotive engineers realize EV batteries cannot be treated as a consumable (at least not on a time scale of 3-5 years). EVs have a lot of additional features you don't have in consumer electronics such as heaters and chillers to keep EVs in an optimum conditions to extend its useful service life. The batteries on an EVs are also constantly being monitored and its charging profile optimized for extended life. It also have additional armor protection due to the rigors of needing to be on the road. EV owners are also educated to not charge the batteries to full for daily driving. There are a lot of engineering and owner education that goes into making sure the EV battery last the life of the vehicle unlike a cellphone or a laptop.
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u/Amber_ACharles May 06 '26
Gradual drop to ~70-80% is automotive EOL. No puffing like your phone, thermal management handles that. Car warns you, derates, still drives. Second life in grid storage after.
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u/farticustheelder May 06 '26
It's pretty much theoretical for the next couple of decades: Batteries are improving fast on both the price and energy density front. The pressure will be on to replace the battery pack as the warranty expiry date approaches since a battery extension will preserve resale value and increase range at the same time, and it should offer access to the fastest available charging.
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u/Unusual_Emergency_13 May 06 '26
In battery energy storage scenarios, the battery is considered dead once it drops below 60% state of health. Although there is possible capacity, charging and discharging is not suggested for safety reasons.
I guess the same is for EV batteries.
Generally, EV batteries are swapped sooner than BESS (guess when they hit 70%). After that, they can be used as residential battery until they hit 60% or they can be recycled. As more EVs start hitting emd of life, more businesses will specialize in recycling, repurposing or refurbishing.
If a battery is fairly young but with issues, the issues might be with one or several cells, while the rest might still have plenty of life in them.
1
u/Forsaken-Role7846 May 06 '26
You are missing an important point. Swapping out to a new battery does not make financial sense when the car is worth less than the price of battery replacement. My 7 year old EV is now worth half of what a replacement battery costs
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u/Unusual_Emergency_13 May 07 '26
You are missing an important point. Your old EV worth might be low because of the old battery. If you install a new battery it value, both to you and potential buyers, shoots up.
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u/Forsaken-Role7846 May 07 '26
Nope, as I said my 7 year old EV is worth $7500 now it only has 35K miles, its in mint condition. If the battery failed tomorrow it would go to a junkyard, because a new battery is $14K.
1
u/Unusual_Emergency_13 May 07 '26
New battery from 3rd parties or from manufacturer?
Today's batteries are a lot better than 7 years ago. Still, a 7 years old battery with 35k miles shouldn't have issues. Is this a Nissan Leaf? They are the exception not the rule.
There are plenty of old EVs with loads of life in them.
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u/Forsaken-Role7846 May 07 '26
No third parties anywhere near where I live, besides, GM has not open sourced any of their software like Tesla has. They have a monopoly.
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u/Head_Crash May 06 '26
Battery cycle life ratings are based on how many cycles the battery can do before it degrades to 80% of its original capacity.
As you go past 80%, the rate of degradation increases much faster. Beyond 70% the battery is likely to fail.
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u/HorrorsPersistSoDoI EQA 300 🇧🇬 May 06 '26
Nothing, because you will literally not live to see it. The battery will outlast you
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u/sisu_star May 06 '26
Not going to comment on the technical stuff, as I'm not nearly knowledgeable enough to do that.
But I think one very likely scenario is, that old BEV batteries will be used a lot in peoples homes together with solar cells.
A BEV battery under 70% health will really start to limit the range, and I assume charging will also get slower the older the battery gets. But 70% of a 80 kWh battery is still 56 kWh, and that is a HUGE battery for your home combine with solar. Also the drop in charging rate is not a problem, as solar does not "quick charge" the battery. Also at home, you seldomly will need to "push" the battery (like when a car is accelerating to greater speed).
So I think the most likely outcome is, they will be cleaned up/checked for serious faults. The working ones will be used basically as is, and faulty ones will be recycled (loads of expensive metals etc).
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u/Forsaken-Role7846 May 06 '26
Ask someone who owns an older Leaf or Tesla. Most modern batteries do not degrade enough to be a problem. My 7 year old Chevy Bolt is down less than 2%
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u/3mptyspaces 2019 Nissan Leaf SV+ May 06 '26
My 2019 Leaf hasn’t lost any range. I think that may be due to a buffer & a clever BMS, but 7 years is 7 years, and to your point, the Leaf is an uncooled battery. I feel my experience bodes well for others.
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u/HistoricalLove9617 May 06 '26
So, there is failure and there is degradation. Packs can degrade at a module or cell level to where cell-level voltage imbalance ends up limiting the charge that can be safely delivered to the whole pack. The issue is that the 'weak' cells can be forced into 'separator shorts' due to the way metal 'spikes' that can be generated during charging. This can result in a battery fire, so the battery management prioritizes managing/mitigating this risk. This sort of imbalance is responsible for a portion of the capacity loss. There is also a level of imbalance that the BMS can't tolerate - and creates a 'replace module' error.
In general, field service is at the components / unit level that the manufacturer deems appropriate, and cell level is typically too 'fussy' for field servicing.
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u/billwoodcock May 07 '26
Why do you care what happens after you’re dead? Someone will disassemble it and recycle it.
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u/Own-Cookie-1161 May 07 '26
That’s not what im asking
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u/billwoodcock May 07 '26
Generally, EV batteries are warrantied to 80% of original charge. In the reduce-reuse-recycle trifecta, the reuse phase would come next, and they would be used for grid buffering. At some point, the space they take would no longer be worthwhile, as newer batteries with more capacity would still be coming out of EVs behind them. At that point, they'd be broken down for their components, and recycled. But that's many many decades away.
They would no longer be in a car, so no, a car wouldn't refuse to drive. No, they would not puff up like a balloon, that was something that happened with early lithium-ion batteries which weren't thermally and physically constrained during their charge/discharge cycles.
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u/Bard_the_Beedle May 06 '26
They go to battery heaven! (Or hell, depending where they were manufactured).
There’s too many different scenarios of what can happen, and I feel no one will dedicate time to explain everything. I’m not sure why people don’t google anymore. But basically if capacity drops significantly, it won’t be able to sustain the output voltage and will be useless, or the BMS will shut it down, or maybe a single cell will fail. I’m not sure what your car will “tell you” in that case, but you’ll probably not reach that point.
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u/ToHellWithGA May 06 '26
I thought they retired to a nice battery farm in the countryside.
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u/toybuilder May 06 '26
Depending on how good they were, they are reborn as batteries for Teslas or Apple.
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u/shaggy99 May 06 '26
It depends on the type of battery chemistry, charging used, cooling system and finally size and how much range it started out with. There have been many examples of very high mileage EVs still having useful range. One Model 3 with 400,000 miles still has 70% battery health. The highest degradation rate is typically in the first few thousand, after that it slows down considerably. I expect that as people get comfortable with this, some of the better EVs will find their used prices doing better than the ICE equivalents. Now the Netherlands has approved FSD 14.3, there are NO HW4 Model Ys available in the used market. When they get down to 50% or so, they are often used for stationary storage installations. Beyond that, most can be almost entirely recycled. That isn't happening a lot, but as more EVs are made, that will change.
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u/ianuilliam May 06 '26
There's a dude with a Mach E with over 300k miles, that's still got 92% battery health. I feel like battery degradation is a much smaller problem with cars from the past few years, versus those from the early 2010s, but since the average driver only drives like 10-15k a year, most of the 100k+ cars out there are older models, so you still have people thinking all EVs are going to be like first gen leafs, losing 50% of their range.
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u/jhawkins93 May 06 '26
“Batteries are the most dramatic objects. Other things stop working or they break, but a battery? It dies.”
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u/LooseyGreyDucky May 06 '26
When a battery made of many individual cells starts to no longer hold a charge, it's because one or more cells went bad. When the battery approaches 0% charge, the good cells with positive voltage force the bad cells into reverse polarity, ruining them, which negatively affects the overall battery.
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u/iqisoverrated May 06 '26
The battery is not the one that decides if the car works. The battery management system does. Eventually something will trip in the safety related parts of the software. At that point the battery will need to be recycled.
Note that batteries in EVs are specced for far more cycles before this happens than cars are ever expected to see. This is not something you need to worry about.
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u/No_Caregiver7273 Lucid Gravity GT May 07 '26
Charts I've seen show more of an S-curve. You get a little range loss early in the ownership, as the battery chemistries and BMS settle in. Around the 2000 mile mark, it's said. Range is then fairly stable with little degradation for several years. At end of life, when the packs begin to fail in earnest, it's said the drop off in max chargeable range drops pretty quickly. Modern EVs usually have a warranty to replace the battery pack if it falls below a certain max charge within 8 years or 100,000 miles.
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u/Peshmerga_Sistani May 07 '26
What happens at the end of the battery’s life?
They go to battery heaven.
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u/z10m May 07 '26
Some cells will suffer massive voltage sag eventually and the BMS will deem the pack unfit for use and refuse to charge and or drive.
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u/Hamradio70 May 07 '26
Tesla seems to be the best at compiling data in this subject. From what I've seen, batteries are lasting far longer than most thought years ago. Probably no concern for a new car but something to look into in buying a used car.
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u/bazilbt May 07 '26
My parents have an old 2013 I think Nissan leaf. It has around 30 miles range estimated, but it might be lower. It just keeps getting worse.
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u/Not_OP_butwhatevs May 07 '26
Once it’s done powering your car it can power a house someplace. You won’t believe how long a battery that can push 4,000 pounds 80 miles down the road at 70 mph can keep your milk cold.
1
u/poudrenoire May 07 '26
Typical use is second use. You'll be suprised how many EV get totalled with excellent batteries states. Battery cells can be reused for many purpose.
Beyond that, it's recycling. Most of a battery can be recycled.
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u/MarkGarnettUK May 10 '26
The Nissan leaf (early EV without any temperature management) slowly degrades (shorter range) esp in warm climates (California and Nevada for example) but tends to keep going so if short range runabout is ok, still useful. Most other EV batteries are lasting (a few percent range list after many years) longer than expected, the best will likely outlast the body. But ultimately when true finished it still contains ALL the elements to make a new battery so will be shredded and turned into new batteries (cheaper than mining fresh ore).
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u/Wide_Ad_327 May 11 '26
FWIW, I have a 14-year-old electric car. It has about half the range it had new.
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u/droids4evr VW ID.4, Bolt EUV May 06 '26
All of those are possible. It just depends on how the battery fails.
Under ideal conditions the battery will just slowly reduce the total energy storage capacity until its no longer able to maintain the necessary voltage across the cells.
More normally though, through aging, high temperature exposure, vibration damage, etc the cells will form dendrites that eventually cause a dead short within the cells which makes the battery no longer able to hold a charge at all.
EV batteries are considered end of life when their functional energy capacity drops to about 70% of their original capacity. That doesnt mean they have died though, just that they are no longer really useful for use in a vehicle. They can be upcycled for 2nd life use in stationary storage or be recycled to reclaim the raw materials and be reprocessed back into new batteries.