Electric cars have been awesome. But awesome stuff still has drawbacks. Nothing’s perfect right?  The battery has been an electric or hybrid car’s biggest cost killer all this while. A full set of cells is around half the cost of many such vehicles, and they can’t last forever anyway. They’ll likely need replacement in about 10 years’ time, which means we’ll soon have a huge number of formerly very expensive and still very toxic entities lying about. So, many companies that produce cars containing the things are taking this opportunity to hypothesize what to do with them when you’re through.

They could, of course, be stripped down and recycled, but after a decade they should still offer around half of their capacity, enough to buffer the power generated in a home solar array or wind turbine. In other words: reuse is the name of the game, with SolarCity and Tesla partnering to see if the former can make use of the latter’s depleted batteries. GM (creator of the Chevrolet Volt) and Nissan (grower of the Leaf) have recently established similar partnerships with various energy and electrics firms, meaning that today’s greenest cars could continue their enviro-friendly ways in the future — even as their shells rust away in the scrap heap. Great news to know, that these companies have taken such effort to think of the future.

SOURCE via Venturebeat