What If the Most Valuable Part of an EV Isn't the Car?

Rapid depreciation in China's electric vehicle market is often portrayed as evidence that EVs are becoming disposable consumer electronics. Yet the opposite may prove true. 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…