I hate to quote the whole post but responding to Isaac.
I imagine that prius will end up going to some guy who can fix it as the cost of hard parts isn't too high to fix that prius and its really just a lot of labor for people who are more than willing to fix it. Especially at 210k miles. I see it honestly all the time with old Toyotas. Down here a poorer guy would try a piston soak on that prius or re-ring it for very little money and just a lot of labor on his part, replace the wheel bearing, remove the catalytic converter and clean it ultrasonically with a good solvent, and recondition the battery here and there, or a lot of people really do love throwing new batteries in those priuses. They are really popular now as cheap cars like how the old 90s honda civics were.
I think my main point here is the *average* age of vehicle on the road is 12.3 years old now.
https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2022/...-old-are-cars/
I'm not sure what the distribution for the average is but many many cars are affordable enough to repair that they are able to be kept on the road for many years after the average to keep the average high at 12.3 years. You start recycling cars at 12-15 years because the battery is $20k replacement cost and that average will go way down. Like we saw with covid you shrink the total share of cars on the road and they all become more much expensive since there are less cars. Just from haulting production on new cars to basically nill we saw used cars below $10,000 effectively double in price since everybody start shopping downwards just to get what they needed and it leaves the folks at the bottom much worse off (inflation has been around 50% but used cars it has been 100%).
I think if high cycle life batteries take off though instead of the current lithiums though we could be in much better shape.
I seriously doubt we will go full electric though. Like the obama era cafe regulations they were reversed, but they led to a lot of progress.
If we get a good mix of hybrids, plug-in hybrids, EVs for households where it works, and diesel mixes we would be in a good spot.
At this point i almost cringe when people buy regular 4 cylinder camrys instead of the hybrid. But a lot of people don't want to own the car long enough to justify the extra cost of the hybrid option.
I think the quote for the total life cycle for passenger cars of a certain model year to be about 25 years before effectively all of them are off the road and recycled (2% remaining).They were using some of those quotes to try and guess how long it would take to fully electrifiy the american car market since people won't just throw out good cars, they will just conk out naturally over time. Which kind of makes sense. Try find a 90s Honda Civic now compared to 10 years ago.
I bet if we really step it up and it to gear the market could be HEV/BEV/EV in around 35 years.
It'll get figured out though we are still really in the early infancy of battery technology with people just now spending the time to develop it as said above. If we can get brand T and others to quit using construction adhesive on their massive battery packs and do a bit more modular packs that are rebuildable we could increase the repairability a lot!
Like how people repair Priuses or the OG Tesla Roadsters: