People will buy completely wrecked Teslas for $5-20k just to extract and resell the battery modules. Each of the 16 battery modules from an S goes for about $12

People will buy completely wrecked Teslas for $5-20k just to extract and resell the battery modules. Each of the 16 battery modules from an S goes for about $1200 a pop. The secondary market will buy essentially any quantity of lithium cells if the price is below $200/kWh, no questions asked. Recycling efforts are almost always for show. If a cell or module has at least 30% of its original capacity remaining, people will reuse it for stationary storage or weight-insensitive vehicles. Shredding and recovering cathode materials from lithium cells is about as economically nonsensical as recovering silicon from cell phones. There is such a massive worldwide shortage of batteries right now that worrying about dumping them in landfills is beyond pointless. You may as well worry that we're throwing away too many gold bars.