by MAURA KELLER
Surprisingly, hybrid vehicles only made up around two percent of total U.S. auto sales in 2017.
According to Gordon Heidacker, managing director and automotive sector group head with Great American Group, the current status of the hybrid vehicle market in the U.S. differs from that of the rest of the world, mostly due to the varied regulatory efforts of local, federal and state governments around the globe.
“In the U.S., hybrid vehicle uptake is growing slower than the rest of the world. The hybrid, fuel cell and battery electric portion of the market continues to hover around five percent of the total market despite becoming more crowded with new models each year,” Heidacker said. Meanwhile, in total contrast, the Chinese market and government has declared its intention to go fully electric in all its city markets, driving innovation and transition for those automakers to compete in this region. Europe is not far behind China with the same mindset.
As Heidacker explained, in the last few years overall technology has improved in weight, power and cost. “Investments in this arena have yielded some positive results while being pushed by governmental decree, but not enough to make pure electrics profitable,” Heidacker said. “Today, hybrids remain the best bang for the buck on partial electrification and CO2 savings.”
Of course the role hybrid vehicles play within the recycling industry is also dependent on consumers’ interest level in this technology. Consumers’ desire for hybrid vehicles is continually increasing in number and percentage due to market drivers that are regulated and incentivized pricing. However, in the U.S., while some customers may feel compelled to buy a hybrid, data shows that most consumers are voting with their dollars by buying a gasoline powered vehicle.
So how does this impact the recycling efforts surrounding hybrid technology? First and foremost, the electric drive portion of these cars is generally less complicated and thus breakdown less than an internal combustion engine (ICE).
“So recycling and remanufacturing of the base electrification hard parts is not yet at a level where there are high numbers of failures driving aftermarket need,” Heidacker said. “Since the life of vehicles in the U.S. averages at 11.6 years – and hybrids are a relatively new product – we don’t see a substantial impact short term.”
Stephen Voller is chief executive officer and founder of ZapGo, a high-technology business founded in 2013 with the goal to develop the next generation of batteries beyond lithium. He explains that in a hybrid vehicle you have two of everything. You have an electric drive and also you have a combustion engine to either drive the vehicle or use as a generator to charge the batteries. This means that there is two of everything to recycle.
“Of course, the electric drives and the batteries are evolving and there are many different types,” Voller said. The earlier Toyota Prius vehicles, for example, used nickel metal hydride batteries and the later ones now use lithium-ion batteries that contain cobalt.
“Neither battery is easy to recycle nor are they very different. Both nickel and lithium, when mixed into battery compounds, are highly toxic,” Voller explained. “There is a myth that somehow these batteries are going to be reused by electrical utilities. But they are the same type of batteries used in mobile phones that wear out after time. No one wants your secondhand phone battery for that reason, and nobody is going to want a secondhand vehicle battery either.
As adoption rates increase, it will most likely revert to a remanufactured product base as the electric engines and the inverters can be rebuilt for more use.
“However on the battery side (lithium ion), more energy will need to be invested into the development of a process to truly recycle the spent batteries,” Heidacker said. “To date, no one really does this as there is no market and the projected cost would be very high – higher than the cost of a newly produced battery. Until the production rate goes up and there is an environmental issue with old batteries, we won’t see much in this arena. As of today, most recyclers are taking battery packs apart and restructuring the cells that still work into new packs, which is, in essence, repackaging and recertifying for use.”
Heidacker predicted that as higher adoption of EVs, HEVs, and other derivatives in the alternative propulsion market happens, it will drive more vehicle volume. These hybrid vehicles would displace ICE powered vehicles and it will reduce the influx of vehicles into the recycling pipeline.
“However, accidents and general wear on the main mechanical parts would not change so expect failures on the other systems of the car to remain generally the same,” Heidacker said. Overall this would reduce cars coming to the recycling yard – but only incrementally, as we do not foresee any dramatic or large shift to hybrid in the next several years. A major shift to the recycling activity surrounding hybrids would only occur naturally if an altogether new battery technology were to be developed that reduced cost dramatically from today’s level.”
Voller said that by definition, hybrid vehicles are considered an interim step toward full battery electric vehicles. In cities like London and Paris, where ICE vehicles will be totally banned by 2040, this will also include hybrid vehicles.
“Most analysts now believe there will be an inflexion point in 2025, when the large vehicle manufacturers begin to produce more electric drive vehicles than combustion engine vehicles,” Voller said. “At this point, the demand for batteries will soar.”
This not only presents challenges to the supply chain, such as, “Is there enough lithium and cobalt on the planet?” but also, “What do the vehicle manufacturers do with it at the end of life?”
“This is because under European law, a consumer has the right to return a product to the manufacturer when they have finished with it, so it becomes the vehicle manufacturer’s problem to recycle it,” Voller said. “But who wants a worn-out battery? At the same time, the price of new batteries is likely to fall, and there will be technological improvements, so these old batteries are like saying I want a computer from 10 years ago. Nobody does.”
Heidacker expects there will always be a need to purchase core product for remanufacturing in the hybrid side of the business for electric propulsion. This is no different than that of the current process for engines and transmissions, which are remanufactured by need and volume popularity.
“The largest challenge will be what to do with the spent batteries, and any mixed metal composites used for light weighting the vehicles,” Heidacker said. “As in this case, there is not a mature recycling need, process or infrastructure.”
Published in the March 2019 Edition