On a bi-weekly basis, CAR welcomes our audience to decompress with our President and CEO, Carla Bailo, as she covers and shares her thoughts on the latest Hot Topics happening in the automotive industry. While the biweekly newsletter primarily covers three topics, this feature story previews one of the topics covered on May 13, 2022. If you would like access to the full newsletter for better insights into critical industry issues you and your organization are facing, sign up for our mailing list here.
HOT TOPICS 5/9/2022 – 5/13/2022
EV Batteries and Battery Recycling
- U.S. launches $45 million program for EV battery development
- Biden administration announces $3.1 billion to make electric vehicle batteries in the U.S.
- Stellantis CEO warns about future EV battery shortage, Asian reliance
- Alliance releases policy framework on EV battery recycling
- Tesla significantly increases its battery recycling capacity, but only a few owner battery packs are coming back
- Ford EV Batteries Will Switch Over To Lithium Phosphate Soon
Carla’s thoughts:
EV batteries and their recycling is quite the dilemma. All automakers are moving to EVs quickly, but some headwinds need to be considered in terms of supply of raw materials. Stellantis’s CEO is one of the few talking about this issue, but it’s very real. In the US, we are very constrained for raw materials and raw material refining. With the future plans for the EV explosion, we don’t have the capacity here in the US for battery manufacturing and/or EV production. Our manufacturing capacity needs to be greatly enhanced as does our ability to have access to raw materials.
At present, automakers are forging their own partnerships with raw material suppliers to be certain of supply. This will continue, but the US must support the supply chain for raw materials for EV. Manufacturing incentives are needed to as well as mining possibilities. Further, we need to be able to do this sustainably and safely – this requires new thinking and research. Never before have we needed research in this area, and academia needs funding to make these breakthroughs.
Beyond this, we MUST have recycling centers in place for batteries. If we can recover the raw materials, this will alleviate some of the stress for raw material mining and refining. Again, we need research dollars to improve this process, and it’s far from easy.
Lastly, in general, we need to do a better job of recycling in the US overall. As a country, we are far behind the leaders and have much room to improve. Starting with how we manufacture and package products to end of life, we must do better!
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Carla Bailo
President & CEO
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