The batteries are replaceable, so the body of the car won't go to waste. As for the battery, there's still plenty of useful things it can do. Just because it's

The batteries are replaceable, so the body of the car won't go to waste. As for the battery, there's still plenty of useful things it can do. Just because it's not useful for a car, doesn't mean it dead. The most obvious use case right now is grid-scale energy storage. There you just need lots and lots of joules of storage, you're not really worried about space or weight (at least compared to car batteries), so it's perfectly viable to take thousands of scrap car batteries with only 60-70% of their original capacity and use them for grid storage. Additionally in grid storage you can be much kinder to your batteries, further extending their life well beyond what they could do in car. At the end of all that, break down the battery and recover the materials. Admittedly we don't have any cost effective ways of doing that today, but as demand for battery raw materials increases, the finical viability of recycling also increases.