Are electric cars really better for the environment than models that run on fossil fuels? We've taken a closer look 👇
] with a punctured battery casing,” he says. “That didn’t damage any of the cells, but it did allow moisture within the battery – and the battery gave an insulation fault. We repaired the puncture wound, sealed it up, dried out the pack and got the vehicle back on the road.
“We’ve even repaired batteries that have had internal individual cell failures. But that doesn’t end the life of the battery either. The cells are simply repaired and put back in.”“The degraded batteries that we see are from the first-generation Nissan Leaf and are 10 years old. The worst I’ve seen has degraded to a 50% state of health,” says Cleevely. That means there’s around 12kWh of usable battery storage left within a 24kWh battery – about enough to run a house for an evening.
Applications where these batteries have been reused include powering aircraft at airport gates, powering forklifts in warehouses and for home and commercial energy storage. Nissan also uses them to power automated guided vehicles that deliver parts in its factories.