When it comes to electric cars, many criticisms are linked to the extraction methods of the materials necessary for the creation of batteries, and rightly so: batteries are the most expensive element of an electric car since they contain a fair amount of rare earths and other precious and/or highly polluting materials once processed, and it is therefore very important that the batteries are recycled once they can no longer perform their primary function, and this is precisely the path chosen by BMW.
Nicolas Peter, finance manager of the German company, told us about it; to have more ecological cars, but also less expensive to produce, it will be necessary to invest heavily in the recycling of batteries, extracting from them as much material as possible to be reused in new batteries, rather than choosing as a first approach the investment in mining activities which today occupy themselves with extracting all the necessary materials.
--> In this sense, BMW's decision is closely linked to the need to have reliable and respectable partners: the company has in fact already signed collaboration agreements with very important companies in the environment, such as the Chinese companies CATL and EVE. These agreements will allow BMW to streamline its work in terms of battery production, since these will arrive "ready-made" from the chosen partners: even the recycling aspect will be managed almost entirely outside the BMW production centres, with the exception of a recycling plant in China that BMW has opened thanks to a joint venture.
In BMW's idea, this strategy will lead to a significant reduction in battery production costs, thus increasing revenues from electric cars that to date they are still significantly less profitable than an internal combustion car of the same price range. For potential customers, however, the hope is that sooner or later this strategy will also translate into electric cars with a lower list price.