> Toyota is still digging its heels in on gas-powered cars, even though the fact that Tesla used Japanese batteries in its early days proves Japan was once ahead of the curve.but they always seem to retreat right back into their comfort zone after a brief flash of brilliance, watching the rest of the world race ahead while they continue living in the past.
Did Japan get behind on battery tech? Couldn't them make a priority to get an edge there too?
I used to follow it closely and be in the industry, but it still seems like Japan is gonna be the last "mostly ICE cars" of the developed countries.
Which is a shame, because it has a perfect combination of short-range needs (I mean, look at kei-cars), tons of wonderful places to hang out while charging (toll-way rest areas are so good), rare sub-freezing temperatures in most of the country, mandatory vehicle inspections (which could collect great safety data as well as preventative maintenance), general love of new cars and brand loyalty, lack of political or individual divide of "big gas trucks are manly", mobile-power-station earthquake preparedness (a nice bonus), generally cooperative nation-wide infrastructure...
I guess we just have to hope the main automakers can hold on long enough for solid-state batteries and move faster than a snail's pace when it does.
Ironically, on the Japanese net, you'll find people complain about the "low range" of EVs compared to hybrids, meanwhile most people don't ever drive (let alone travel) outside of their own prefecture.
Solid-state batteries are facing production hell now, with lots of issues cropping up when tested at large-scale in real devices.
So they are not expected in meaningful quantities until the early 2030-s.
And the LFP chemistry has now advanced so much that solid-state batteries might not even matter anymore, except for some niche uses like aviation/drones.
We could have smaller transportation with combustion engines too, but the margins are lower and they cover fewer use cases, so marketing larger vehicles works really well.
It is curious - you would think they would love it? But they don't - is it simply the case of the Chinese beating them - stubbornness and pride? Or is there something more going on?
Toyota was seemingly decades ahead at one point with their hybrid cars; but now they have resigned to a defensive position compared to Tesla, Chinese automakers, even the European ones.
Toyota's first Prius (hybrid) came out in 1997 and Nissan's first Leaf (full electric) in 2010. Both Japanese, both ahead of the curve, now way behind it.
It is an interesting situation.
Anecdote: I have a 2014 Leaf, purchased a couple of years ago as the first foray into EVs. It's a great little car, perfect for the daily short trips for which we bought it. Use-case matters!
Aren’t all Teslas made in the US supplied with American made batteries? In partnership with Panasonic, for the Model 3, but still a Tesla factory in Nevada. And I think 4680s are all Tesla made, correct?
No, they are all 100% made by Panasonic, with Panasonic technology, in buildings that Panasonic master-leases from Tesla. The only thing Tesla has contributed is the shell and the sign outside. Panasonic developed the 4680 form factor at Tesla's request, by the way that program has been a major failure.
Tesla owns and controls the entire Nevada facility. Panasonic leases manufacturing space from Tesla. “Master-leases” is not an accurate description.
The Nevada 2170 cells are entirely Panasonic design, as this was set up before Tesla even attempted to gain battery cell expertise. The Nevada facility is also doing battery pack production, which is entirely done by Tesla.
Tesla designed and specified the 4680 format, and has gambled with a novel manufacturing process. Separately, in response to Tesla specifications, Panasonic also developed its own manufacturing process to produce that format. These have nothing to do with the 4680 cells made by Tesla. Panasonic has no involvement in that.
To call the 4680 production ramp a “major failure” is hyperbolic. It’s not a major success either, but it has been partially successful, insofar as it’s producing a large quantity of cells going into real customer cars. It is not yet clear whether the various manufacturing innovations (e.g. dry process) will result in a (delayed) success.
> The industry standard for the recovery of lithium (remember there is a difference between recovery and extraction) is 90%, with some platforms now achieving 95%+ like those that use carbonation.
Some battery recycling challenges are minimal volume at this point on the EV adoption curve, and LFP and sodium ion battery chemistries won’t be worth recycling for the materials alone (but still require recycling as ewaste).
Sulfuric acid, hydrogen peroxide, sodium carbonate. Not catalysts but reagents. Most currently come from fossil fuel feedstock but that isn't essential.
Why would any of those compounds come from fossil fuels? Sulfur is mined, hydrogen peroxide is water with some oxygen taken off, and sodium carbonate is made from salt and limestone
It really should not be surprising that we can get very high recovery percentages from batteries -- we do not mine elemental lithium, so the processes we use for extraction are already designed to extract lithium from fairly low-purity sources. In contrast, lithium batteries are an incredibly high-purity source of lithium. The main question is when it will become cost-effective to create recycling pipelines.
Lead acid batteries had a similar trajectory and modern lead acid batteries are effectively 100% recycled.
> It really should not be surprising that we can get very high recovery percentages from batteries -- we do not mine elemental lithium
Plenty of substances we don't mine elementally are not worth recycling. The main advantage with lithium is it tends to go into large volumes of standardised chemistries.
U.S. lead acid baterries recycling has been outsourced.
"
As the United States tightened regulations on lead processing to protect Americans over the past three decades, finding domestic lead became a challenge. So the auto industry looked overseas to supplement its supply. In doing so, car and battery manufacturers pushed the health consequences of lead recycling onto countries where enforcement is lax, testing is rare and workers are desperate for jobs.
"
Yeah, too many lead batteries here, and there are a lot of battery recycle factories. It's been a health and environment concern for a while. And these batteries allowed to put motors on rickshaw, we call them "Tesla", And they are also another hazard, and menace for the price of faster transportation.
Still, the overall benefit might still be positive for lithium from widespread air pollution from combustion engines to more localized pollution. Though obviously the world needs to work on better processes for the local pollutants.
As an Indian this is exactly one of the reasons why I am afraid of EV boom. All of that bad stuff, which we are mostly unfamiliar with (in terms of how to handle it properly, because battery tech is always changing) is going to dumped in places like India. And would silently sustain the bad effects for many decades or even more, until it (the bad stuff) somehow reaches some developed country (probably never).
If you've ever seen a video of Nigerians "recycling" lead batteries you'd be hard pressed to call it that. Katana in one hand, bucket on the floor, no shoes, let's go.
This is probably somewhat true, but also I suspect there might be an order of magnitude difference from extracting trace lithium from inert rock vs collecting it as a salt from amongst a medley of very refined metals.
Case in point - lead acid batteries are not a fair comparison. A lead acid battery is so robust you can separate the cathodes and anodes with your (gloved) hands. Getting the elements out of a lead battery is like picking pieces of pepperoni off of a pizza. Whereas taking lithium out of a lithium cell is like pulling only a certain protein out of a roll of bologna. And the protein catches fire in contact with air.
I think the issues with recycling lithium from electrolyte containing lithium hexafluorophosphate in solvents is more the hexafluorophosphate part; it's highly reactive, hygroscopic and releases (toxic, corrosive) hydrogen fluoride upon contact with water. So purely from economic perspective it's possibly not worth it unless we are very lithium-constrained. Of course it should be done anyway as there will be a lot of used batteries in near future.
The article doesn't really give us the details which is a pity.
This article is poor, because lithium is just one part of the value contained within EV batteries. Far more valuable is any nickel, cobalt and graphite. Equally valuable is any copper and aluminium. Unless you're effectively recycling a significant number of the major materials, it's not enough.
Furthermore, it's not a remarkable achievement. By contrast to this headline, Redwood Materials claims "Redwood’s technology can recover, on average, more than 95% of materials like nickel, cobalt, copper, aluminum, lithium and graphite in a lithium-ion battery."[0]
Yes, LFP is a better chemistry for various reasons including cost. Thankfully this means that nickel and cobalt are not needed for EVs adoption to continue scaling.
For now, NMC remains superior for some high performance applications, as well as for high-end laptops and phones. Yes, there are "myriad" problems with nickel and cobalt. These problems will diminish as scale makes recycling economically competitive to virgin material mining.
At some point the number of EV batteries being disposed will approach equilibrium to the number of new vehicle batteries manufactured. When this happens the amount of virgin nickel and cobalt needed will also approach zero.
> Far more valuable is any nickel, cobalt and graphite. Equally valuable is any copper and aluminium.
All of these metals are already almost fully recycled (not sure about graphite). Lithium is the toughest to recycle and it's not solved yet, so it's right to focus on that, because there will be a lot of lithium electrolyte to dispose in the near future.
> This new technique doesn’t just recycle materials; it recovers most of them at an unbelievable rate.
I'm so tired of reading articles written by LLM. There are several sites that just ingest material (like studies) and crap out low-effort LLM articles.
I used to enjoy watching smaller youtubers, but everytime I've given one a chance lately it has been unbearably clear that it was written by an llm. Supposedly people have ingested so much llm writing that they've naturally started writing in a similar style.
The key point will be the energy inputs, and catalyst or other process input losses. Not the % recovery, its more recovery at an economically viable cost
Many processes could recover the inputs. Some are tremendously polluting. Cheap methods to recover lead from older lead-acid car batteries would be an example, or the way scavengers burn plastic insulation of recovered copper wiring.
TL;DR exernalities and economics and pollution drive recycling issues, not % recovery at this point. We know how to recover a lot of the inputs. Knowing how to industrialise and scale it up is what counts.
John McCarthy (of LISP fame) was an (in)famous curmudgeon on USENET, frequently used to say future generations will thank us for making giant collections in the ground of highly valuable recoverable industrial inputs, what we call "rubbish dumps" -He was only partially less wrong, but had a point to make about the cost of inputs to industry vs raw mining costs. If we do come up with a process to strip mine rubbish dumps and send feedstocks in the appropriate directions there's a lot there. Complex plastics, Metals, Organics, Acids, Methane Gas, you-name-it. We already collect and harvest the methane to drive other dump works, the idea of mining the materials isn't "wrong" as much as insufficiently economic right now against raw material sources.
The 90% recovery rate is not groundbreaking by itself. The real value is lower contamination and emissions—but it still needs to prove cost-effective at industrial scale.
> Scientists found a way to extract up to 90% of oxygen from air! They call it “breathing”
No, they don't and no, they wouldn't. "Inhaled air [at sea level] contains 21% O2 while exhaled breath contains approximately 16% O2 and 5% CO2" [1]. 24% recovery.
The article seems to be very unspecific about what it is this company does that is so different. It also steps over the fact that there are already quite a few companies active in the US, EU, and China that are recycling batteries. Nor is the cited percentage that remarkable. That's ballpark what competitors are achieving as well. Probably a bit more. 10% lithium is a lot of lithium to not recover. Most natural deposits of lithium have very low concentrations of it.
The main thing actually holding back the recycling industry is the lack of batteries that need recycling, not the lack of technology needed to recycle them. Most of the batteries produced in the last ten years are still being used. And quite a few might head for a second life in storage for another decade or so. It's probably going to be another decade before recycling hits a scale where it becomes a significant and lucrative source of valuable raw materials.
And as others mentioned, it's not just about recycling the lithium in batteries. It's not like cobalt, nickel, copper, graphite, etc. end up on the trash heap.
Japan was one of the first countries to be hit with rare-earth export-restrictions by China - going back to 2010. It seems that a lot of policy came out from this unpleasant shock, incl. the decision by Toyota to focus on developing FCEVs which would be less dependent on Chinese supply-chains. Ironically, the resulting vacuum may have actually led to Chinese/American companies gaining market share in the BEV space.
Still, given how things are going, FCEVs (and Japan with it) might actually end-up having the last laugh.
There's a reason Japan could be burdened with the largest modern nuclear disaster and then choose to double down on nuclear capacity. It's an island nation with no domestic energy reserves - completely dependent on energy markets.
FCEVs make no sense if you have plenty of fossil fuel or access to cheap lithium batteries. But if you see hydrogen as a less resource-bottlenecked way to store energy, it starts to make sense.
I’ve always been amazed at how differently the PHEV, HFC, and standard EV market ended up (well, until recently) playing out, in Japan Vs The Rest of the World. I always found the hydrogen stations here in California to be an interesting anomaly — but once you learn about the infrastructure and vehicles forced on the Japanese by gov/corp alliance, you really get a fascinating ‘alternate reality/history’ localized entirely on the island of Japan lol
Currently hydrogen is just oil with extra steps. Efficient electrolysis either needs ultra-rare materials like iridium and platinum, or exotic ceramics for continuous high-temperature electrolysis.
I personally can't see how this arrangement can supplant oil and batteries.
The article is very, very light with details. The university or research center is not named. No scientist is named. No link. Nothing that tells "look, we're telling you real, solid, serious stuff."
The technical challenge has never been recovering materials. It's recovering them cheaply enough that recycling beats mining.
If this process scales economically, it could end up being more important than another small improvement in battery chemistry.
Incidentally, companies developing technologies for reusing EV batteries in grid storage applications (where even <80% capacity EV batteries are just fine for many years), have trouble getting enough EV batteries, because they last much longer than we were made to believe.
78 comments
[ 0.14 ms ] story [ 28.3 ms ] thread> Toyota is still digging its heels in on gas-powered cars, even though the fact that Tesla used Japanese batteries in its early days proves Japan was once ahead of the curve.but they always seem to retreat right back into their comfort zone after a brief flash of brilliance, watching the rest of the world race ahead while they continue living in the past.
Did Japan get behind on battery tech? Couldn't them make a priority to get an edge there too?
Which is a shame, because it has a perfect combination of short-range needs (I mean, look at kei-cars), tons of wonderful places to hang out while charging (toll-way rest areas are so good), rare sub-freezing temperatures in most of the country, mandatory vehicle inspections (which could collect great safety data as well as preventative maintenance), general love of new cars and brand loyalty, lack of political or individual divide of "big gas trucks are manly", mobile-power-station earthquake preparedness (a nice bonus), generally cooperative nation-wide infrastructure...
I guess we just have to hope the main automakers can hold on long enough for solid-state batteries and move faster than a snail's pace when it does.
So they are not expected in meaningful quantities until the early 2030-s.
And the LFP chemistry has now advanced so much that solid-state batteries might not even matter anymore, except for some niche uses like aviation/drones.
Toyota was seemingly decades ahead at one point with their hybrid cars; but now they have resigned to a defensive position compared to Tesla, Chinese automakers, even the European ones.
It is an interesting situation.
Anecdote: I have a 2014 Leaf, purchased a couple of years ago as the first foray into EVs. It's a great little car, perfect for the daily short trips for which we bought it. Use-case matters!
Aren’t all Teslas made in the US supplied with American made batteries? In partnership with Panasonic, for the Model 3, but still a Tesla factory in Nevada. And I think 4680s are all Tesla made, correct?
Tesla owns and controls the entire Nevada facility. Panasonic leases manufacturing space from Tesla. “Master-leases” is not an accurate description.
The Nevada 2170 cells are entirely Panasonic design, as this was set up before Tesla even attempted to gain battery cell expertise. The Nevada facility is also doing battery pack production, which is entirely done by Tesla.
Tesla designed and specified the 4680 format, and has gambled with a novel manufacturing process. Separately, in response to Tesla specifications, Panasonic also developed its own manufacturing process to produce that format. These have nothing to do with the 4680 cells made by Tesla. Panasonic has no involvement in that.
To call the 4680 production ramp a “major failure” is hyperbolic. It’s not a major success either, but it has been partially successful, insofar as it’s producing a large quantity of cells going into real customer cars. It is not yet clear whether the various manufacturing innovations (e.g. dry process) will result in a (delayed) success.
Edit: linked article is also from April.
Use of "Scientists" is sloppy, also. It manufactures authority. Present the facts and let the reader judge whether they are scientists or not.
> The industry standard for the recovery of lithium (remember there is a difference between recovery and extraction) is 90%, with some platforms now achieving 95%+ like those that use carbonation.
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/13/nx-s1-5847025/ev-battery-recy...
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/02/nx-s1-5706658/electric-vehicl...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48893945
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48013768
Lead acid batteries had a similar trajectory and modern lead acid batteries are effectively 100% recycled.
Plenty of substances we don't mine elementally are not worth recycling. The main advantage with lithium is it tends to go into large volumes of standardised chemistries.
" As the United States tightened regulations on lead processing to protect Americans over the past three decades, finding domestic lead became a challenge. So the auto industry looked overseas to supplement its supply. In doing so, car and battery manufacturers pushed the health consequences of lead recycling onto countries where enforcement is lax, testing is rare and workers are desperate for jobs. "
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/20/world/americas/car-batter...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/18/world/africa/...
This is recently (2010) in California even: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exide_lead_contamination
Still, the overall benefit might still be positive for lithium from widespread air pollution from combustion engines to more localized pollution. Though obviously the world needs to work on better processes for the local pollutants.
As an Indian this is exactly one of the reasons why I am afraid of EV boom. All of that bad stuff, which we are mostly unfamiliar with (in terms of how to handle it properly, because battery tech is always changing) is going to dumped in places like India. And would silently sustain the bad effects for many decades or even more, until it (the bad stuff) somehow reaches some developed country (probably never).
Getting rid of all that waste material from Galena was maybe a different incentive structure but yeah.
Case in point - lead acid batteries are not a fair comparison. A lead acid battery is so robust you can separate the cathodes and anodes with your (gloved) hands. Getting the elements out of a lead battery is like picking pieces of pepperoni off of a pizza. Whereas taking lithium out of a lithium cell is like pulling only a certain protein out of a roll of bologna. And the protein catches fire in contact with air.
The article doesn't really give us the details which is a pity.
Furthermore, it's not a remarkable achievement. By contrast to this headline, Redwood Materials claims "Redwood’s technology can recover, on average, more than 95% of materials like nickel, cobalt, copper, aluminum, lithium and graphite in a lithium-ion battery."[0]
[0] https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/recycle-with-us/
For now, NMC remains superior for some high performance applications, as well as for high-end laptops and phones. Yes, there are "myriad" problems with nickel and cobalt. These problems will diminish as scale makes recycling economically competitive to virgin material mining.
At some point the number of EV batteries being disposed will approach equilibrium to the number of new vehicle batteries manufactured. When this happens the amount of virgin nickel and cobalt needed will also approach zero.
All of these metals are already almost fully recycled (not sure about graphite). Lithium is the toughest to recycle and it's not solved yet, so it's right to focus on that, because there will be a lot of lithium electrolyte to dispose in the near future.
I'm so tired of reading articles written by LLM. There are several sites that just ingest material (like studies) and crap out low-effort LLM articles.
Many processes could recover the inputs. Some are tremendously polluting. Cheap methods to recover lead from older lead-acid car batteries would be an example, or the way scavengers burn plastic insulation of recovered copper wiring.
TL;DR exernalities and economics and pollution drive recycling issues, not % recovery at this point. We know how to recover a lot of the inputs. Knowing how to industrialise and scale it up is what counts.
John McCarthy (of LISP fame) was an (in)famous curmudgeon on USENET, frequently used to say future generations will thank us for making giant collections in the ground of highly valuable recoverable industrial inputs, what we call "rubbish dumps" -He was only partially less wrong, but had a point to make about the cost of inputs to industry vs raw mining costs. If we do come up with a process to strip mine rubbish dumps and send feedstocks in the appropriate directions there's a lot there. Complex plastics, Metals, Organics, Acids, Methane Gas, you-name-it. We already collect and harvest the methane to drive other dump works, the idea of mining the materials isn't "wrong" as much as insufficiently economic right now against raw material sources.
No, they don't and no, they wouldn't. "Inhaled air [at sea level] contains 21% O2 while exhaled breath contains approximately 16% O2 and 5% CO2" [1]. 24% recovery.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8672270/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61481-y
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/china-recovery-mat...
[0]: https://www.yicai.com/news/103030411.html
The main thing actually holding back the recycling industry is the lack of batteries that need recycling, not the lack of technology needed to recycle them. Most of the batteries produced in the last ten years are still being used. And quite a few might head for a second life in storage for another decade or so. It's probably going to be another decade before recycling hits a scale where it becomes a significant and lucrative source of valuable raw materials.
And as others mentioned, it's not just about recycling the lithium in batteries. It's not like cobalt, nickel, copper, graphite, etc. end up on the trash heap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Senkaku_boat_collision_in...
https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/comme...
Japan was one of the first countries to be hit with rare-earth export-restrictions by China - going back to 2010. It seems that a lot of policy came out from this unpleasant shock, incl. the decision by Toyota to focus on developing FCEVs which would be less dependent on Chinese supply-chains. Ironically, the resulting vacuum may have actually led to Chinese/American companies gaining market share in the BEV space.
Still, given how things are going, FCEVs (and Japan with it) might actually end-up having the last laugh.
FCEVs make no sense if you have plenty of fossil fuel or access to cheap lithium batteries. But if you see hydrogen as a less resource-bottlenecked way to store energy, it starts to make sense.
Can I ask your reasoning?
Currently hydrogen is just oil with extra steps. Efficient electrolysis either needs ultra-rare materials like iridium and platinum, or exotic ceramics for continuous high-temperature electrolysis.
I personally can't see how this arrangement can supplant oil and batteries.
Here is another article with that details : https://www.techspot.com/news/112051-japan-finds-way-recover...