The metal inside a dead electric car battery pack is worth about 2,960 dollars

What a dead battery pack is worth

A battery pack sits inside an electric car and stores the energy that powers it. When a pack wears down and can no longer hold enough charge to be useful, it is sometimes called a dead pack, and it still contains metal that can be recovered and sold. At average 2025 prices, the nickel, cobalt, lithium and copper inside an average battery pack built with a nickel manganese cobalt cathode, the layer inside a battery cell where the chemical reaction that stores energy happens, come to about 2,960 dollars. This is a MAOWCE calculation, not a figure any single source states, built from United States Geological Survey metal prices and an International Renewable Energy Agency composition table for a 61 kilowatt hour pack, the average size of a battery electric car pack in 2022.

Lithium beats nickel even though the pack holds less of it

Nickel makes up more of the pack by weight than lithium, 0.72 kilograms per kilowatt hour against 0.63 kilograms, the International Renewable Energy Agency reports. Lithium is still worth more. Nickel trades at 15 dollars a kilogram on the London Metal Exchange in 2025, the United States Geological Survey reports, putting nickel at 10.80 dollars a kilowatt hour of pack. The United States Geological Survey prices lithium as lithium carbonate, a refined chemical compound, at 9,000 dollars a metric ton in 2025. Only about 18.78% of that weight is the lithium metal itself, a fixed chemical ratio, so the metal alone works out to 47.91 dollars a kilogram, more than 3 times the price of nickel a kilogram. That puts lithium at 30.19 dollars a kilowatt hour of pack, the single largest metal value inside it.

The price of lithium carbonate has already crashed once

The lithium carbonate price fell 31% in 2025, down to 9,000 dollars a metric ton from 11,800 dollars in 2024, the United States Geological Survey reports, and down from a peak of 63,700 dollars in 2022. A short term oversupply kept the price low in the first half of 2025, before rising electric vehicle sales in China and Europe pushed the price back up later in the year, the survey reports. Even after that crash, lithium remains the most valuable metal by weight in the pack.

The chemistry inside a pack changes the number by more than a third

A pack built with lithium iron phosphate, a chemistry that needs no nickel or cobalt at all, holds a different total. The same 4 metals in an equivalent lithium iron phosphate pack come to about 1,833 dollars, another MAOWCE calculation, about 62% of the nickel manganese cobalt total. Manganese and graphite also sit inside a battery pack in meaningful weight, the International Renewable Energy Agency reports, but no source used here prices either metal for 2025, so their value is left out of the total rather than guessed at.