Insurers Scrap Electric Cars After Minor Collisions Due to Unrepairable Batteries.
Insurers are writing off entire electric vehicles (EVs) due to a lack of reparability of battery packs after even minor collisions, leading to higher premiums for consumers and a growing pile-up of EV batteries in scrapyards. These battery packs can cost tens of thousands of dollars and represent up to 50% of an EV's price tag, making replacing them uneconomical. Unless reparability in EV batteries is addressed, the pile-ups will increase, and so too will premiums. EVs need to be driven for thousands of miles before the extra emissions used to create them are offset, so scrapping them before reaching that point has a greater environmental impact than fossil-fuel models.