Month: March 2023

Enlarge (credit: D3Damon)

In February 2022, Redwood Materials began a pilot program in California to recycle electric vehicle batteries. The startup partnered with the state government as well as Ford, Volvo, Volkswagen, and Toyota, plus the car dismantling industry, in order to source end-of-life lithium-ion and nickel metal hydride traction batteries. Now, a year in, it has shared some findings from those first 12 months.

In total, Redwood recovered 1,268 battery packs, amounting to more than 500,000 lbs (226,796 kg). The vast majority of these were from cars that had reached the end of their particular road—Redwood says that less than 5 percent were "damaged, defective, or recalled."

Those packs came from 19 different EV and hybrid models, and the vast majority—82 percent in total—was lithium-ion, with the remaining 18 percent NiMH cells. Redwood says it was able to recover 95 percent of the lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and other metals from these packs. And as we noted last month, the company is already producing production-grade copper anode foil.

Enlarge (credit: Getty / Aurich Lawson / Tesla)

On Wednesday afternoon Tesla held a presentation for investors after the close of the markets. Billed as the debut of Elon Musk's third "master plan" for the electric vehicle maker, many fans of the company hoped the event would share concrete details on the long-delayed Cybertruck or an affordable "Model 2" EV.

But after a lengthy disclaimer warning viewers not to put much faith—or perhaps money—in anything that followed, the three-hour livestream provided few new insights into Tesla's plans to expand its product lineup beyond its current aging offerings. Investors did apparently take note, with the car maker's stock plunging nearly 6 percent in after-hours trading.

Master plans have been central to the Tesla mythos from its early days. In 2006, two years after joining the company, Musk published "The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan" on the company's blog. That plan promised to build a sports car, then use the money from that to build "an affordable car," then "an even more affordable car," all while providing zero-emissions energy-generation options.