They have to deal with the metal/battery recycling problem otherwise they have to make a fleet of batteries every n years and deal with staggering landfills. Uneven distribution of raw materials in such a case will cause tensions.
I think it’s a net positive, with for sure some challenges along the way, meanwhile gas cars still work and will for a long time.
On the other hand there is already a market for recycling of metals and batteries. So you've basically avoided the political problem entirely buy just telling people "you'll get X dollars back when you recycle your car's battery". Just practically speaking, a person has got to do something with their old battery, might as well get a few bucks.
Sorry if I was imprecise. I meant dealing with the externalities of fossil fuels, even if 'dealing' turns out to be "change nothing and see what happens".
Compare that to fossil fuels, which have had billions of dollars of research poured into them. We know what the cheapest forms of harm reduction are for fossil fuels, and they're not cheap enough even for the budgets of multiple nations.
It's also (still) bloody hard to carry a bucket of electrons to get a stuck car going - we'll need portable power units to clear, say, highway mass fender-benders.
https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2021...
Throw a bus battery or a generator on a trailer and as long as the vehicles aren't too damaged to operate you can make quick enough progress clearing things out.
That doesn't change the fact that disposable vape pens should be banned, but it's an interesting data point in the recycling discussion.
We will need to eventually figured out something better than disposing of batteries in landfills, but we have a long long time to figure that out.
And very very few of those even get recycled, because there's a huge 3rd party aftermarket for "expired" EV batteries.
There's also a whole industry of people who fix individual cells inside bigger batteries when the official instruction is to scrap it and get a new one for $$$$.
Reuse/refurbishing will still be the biggest use for EV batteries for the 2020's in my opinion.
This is handy because it will allow used EVs to retain more value than otherwise.