Reconciling Design for Manufacture and Design for End of Life
By Richard Lidstone-Scott, Commercial Director
As an electric truck and battery manufacturer, Tevva takes the idea of “design for the end of life” seriously. Products and materials are finite. Ignoring the environmental consequences of these goods as they reach the final stages of their use can have devastating implications for our planet. It would be ironic and counterproductive were we to consign our materials — which are used to zero out emissions in freight — to landfills.
To us, design for “end of life” means putting the planet and our responsibilities as a manufacturer, first. Tevva designs our battery packs with the end of “first” life in mind. But in fact, we go further than that to envision “second” lives for our batteries.
Our batteries are lithium ion, and our battery-build methods through the use of smart-tooling enables us to both be confident in the robustness of the power supply, but also in the long-term maintenance, repair and eventual disassembly of the batteries. Once a battery is no longer fit for use in an EV (typically when it reaches 80% DoD (Depth of Discharge) it still has value in second life applications.
For the past three years, Tevva with its partners on the VALUABLE project have been developing second life solutions as well as identifying the optimal design strategies for ease of disassembly. Second life could be to support ground based energy storage systems or in support of energy buffering in green H2 micro generation.
If Tevva can harness the value of the battery throughout both first and second lives and then recycle what remains, we can reduce the overall costs of EV trucks by understanding and taking advantage of our batteries’ full value across the years. We can ensure our vision of sustainability, and fully embed circular economy principles in the architecture of our vehicle batteries.
Understanding the whole life-cycle of the battery is key to our ability to offer cost effective battery electric commercial vehicles and reduce the burden on first life purchasers — we are looking forward to continuing our work with HSSMI and Aspire on the lifecycle costs to enable us to make flexible business cases for our customers, including looking at production facilities and battery mid-life, end of first life and second life business cases.
