Nissan Takes the Long, Costly Road to Reusing EV Batteries
Rather than strip old cells for precious metals like Tesla or BYD does, the carmaker is working to repurpose them. It’s a painstaking, labor-intensive process.
A Nissan Leaf charging station on display at an Australian exhibition in 2012.
Photographer: Cameron Spencer/Getty Images
In a small seaside town in northeast Japan, factory workers are disassembling old batteries from the world’s first mass-market electric cars and preparing them for a second life. Reusing batteries could help the auto industry live up to its promise to make a truly green transition. But it’s time-consuming and, for now, unprofitable.
Early models of Nissan Motor Co.’s all-electric Leaf, which first went on sale almost 13 years ago, have started to reach the end of their life spans. In an effort to make the end of the cars’ lives as green as their operation was, their used batteries are collected at Nissan dealerships in the US and Japan and sent to the factory in Namie, Fukushima, a town devastated in 2011 by a tsunami and a nuclear disaster.