What If the Most Valuable Part of an EV Isn't the Car?
Kazakhstan Restarts CPC Oil Exports After Week-Long Black Sea Shutdown Leon Stille has a background in energy sciences (MSc and BSc) and is pursuing a PhD in energy policy.
He currently runs his own company,… Rapid depreciation in China's electric vehicle market is often portrayed as evidence that EVs are becoming disposable consumer electronics.
While the vehicle loses value, the battery increasingly becomes a long-lived energy asset with multiple commercial lives ahead of it.
For decades, critics of electric vehicles have warned about one inevitable problem.
What happens when millions of batteries reach the end of their lives? Images of mountains of discarded battery packs have become a familiar feature of debates surrounding the energy transition, reinforcing the perception that electrification simply replaces one environmental problem with another.
The emerging evidence suggests something rather different.
The battery may become the single most valuable component of the vehicle long after the vehicle itself has lost much of its economic value.
China has become the world's largest laboratory for electric mobility.
Its EV fleet is expanding so rapidly that the average electric vehicle on Chinese roads is now only around 1.8 years old, compared with more than eight years for conventional petrol vehicles.
The figure reflects extraordinary sales growth rather than unusually short ownership periods, but it illustrates just how quickly new technology is entering the market.
At the same time, fierce competition between BYD, Tesla and dozens of domestic manufacturers has triggered unprecedented price wars.
Used electric vehicles have depreciated far faster than many analysts expected, with some retaining little more than 40% of their original value after only three years.
| Product | Price | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Brent Crude | $102.14/bbl | +0.34% |
| WTI Crude | $96.90/bbl | +0.21% |
| EN590 Diesel | $846/MT | +0.18% |
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| Sulphur Gran 99.5% | $470/MT | -0.44% |
| Urea 46% Gran | $650/MT | +1.12% |
| NPK 16-16-16 | $460/MT | -0.28% |
| Nat Gas TTF | $15.42/MMBtu | +0.92% |
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