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Toyota is recycling old EV batteries to help power Mazda's production line

(www.thedrive.com)
304 points computerliker | 5 comments | 23 Aug 25 18:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.696s | source
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pornel ◴[27 Aug 25 18:50 UTC] No.45043480[source]▶
Those who TL;DRd - it's for the factory, not the cars!

Old EV batteries are great for energy storage. A worse weight-to-capacity ratio doesn't matter for batteries sitting on the ground. A battery that holds only 70% of its original capacity is considered worn-out for EVs (and even replaced under warranty), but grid storage isn't driving anywhere, so any capacity left is still useful.

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1. DanielHB ◴[28 Aug 25 11:43 UTC] No.45050970[source]▶
Balancing multiple battery packs at different wear levels is a huge nightmare. You have to run rebalancing operations all the time and on used packs it can be quite dangerous to trigger a thermal runaway.

If they do it with different types of batteries it is even more complicated, like you need to write some custom software to sync all that up. This is not a trivial project.

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2. rojcyk ◴[28 Aug 25 12:07 UTC] No.45051163[source]▶
So? They considered it to be worth while for them. Thus are working on it.
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3. DanielHB ◴[28 Aug 25 12:18 UTC] No.45051263[source]▶
I know, it seems it is fairly large operation however, if it wasn't I would assume it was a PR stunt.

This is definitely not worth doing for small scale operations. As far as I know there is no generic solution for doing this kind of thing (I used to work in the area, but not directly on the BMS systems).

4. rini17 ◴[28 Aug 25 12:53 UTC] No.45051587[source]▶
They reuse inverters too. So the packs are separated, no need to balance.
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5. ◴[28 Aug 25 12:59 UTC] No.45051636[source]▶