Love it or hate it, thereโs no doubt the future of motoring is electric. A raft of countries have announced their intention to ban the sale of internal combustion powered cars in the coming decades, and EV sales are increasing at an exponential rate, led by Norway where 40% of all new car sales last year were plug in electric.
Thereโs no denying electric vehicles mean a healthier planet for both humans and the environment, but EVโs arenโt without waste byproduct โ particularly at the end of a carโs lifespan (an estimated 10-12 years). The global stockpile of used EV battery packs is currently around 55,000 but is expected to balloon to more than 3.4 million by 2025, which calls for some serious innovation in the โpost-carโ battery business.
In Madrid with Nissan for the UEFA Champions League Final, we sat down with Nissanโs Managing Director of Energy Services, Francisco Carrenza to learn more about Nissanโs EV recycling strategy was now that the first generation of Leafs, first launched in 2010, were coming to the end of their lives.
โThe Leaf is the worldโs best selling electric vehicle. Weโve now sold over 400,000 [Leafs] globally and weโve come to realise that the second life of a battery is a key point. Itโs becoming more and more clear that the battery life is longer than the life of the car, and we expect to see the batteries from our EVโs have a 20-25 year life span.โ
Some manufacturers, like Tesla, believe there โprobably wonโt be a suitable taskโ for batteries after 10 to 15 years of use. Nissan, on the other hand, are taking a much more innovative approach to the recycling of EV batteries from their Leaf range, aiming instead to provide the batteries with a second-life, with applications ranging from portable camping generators like the Nissan Energy Roam to solar street lamps that store energy to an old Leaf battery during the day, and then illuminate the roads at night. How very meta.
Nissan are also putting their used Leaf battery packs into some seriously large scale applications, with Amsterdamโs ArenA stadium using a 3-megawatt backup power supply โpoweredโ by the equivalent of 148 used Leaf batteries.
EVโs are still very much in their infancy, and if these are the sort of applications automakers are implementing so early on, we canโt wait to see what the future holds for โusedโ EV batteries.
The New Nissan Leaf launches in Australia on July 4 priced from $49,990.
RELATED: Nissanโs GT-R NISMO Is Your Ultimate Tokyo Drift Fantasy
