Our Mission is to “Close the Loop”

There are currently 2.4 million EVs on US roads. In 2023, EV sales grew 54% year over year. 9.3 out of every 100 new light-duty vehicles were EV or PHEV.

And it’s only the beginning.

The Service Problem

This meteoric growth is not matched in service. EV owners are waiting 1-2 months for service in many places, and independent EV shops across the Midwest are few and far between.

Those EV shops that do exist need to source their parts from the original manufacturer at long lead times, from unreliable sources, or from facilities based in California with hefty shipping fees eating into their livelihoods.

An independent auto repair shop in the traditional internal combustion world has many options for parts: Original supplier, OEM branded new parts, aftermarket parts brands, and several reliable sources for used parts. Typically, there’s enough infrastructure that parts can be sourced locally same-day or shipped overnight. The industry is mature, streamlined, and diverse.

Not so for Electric Vehicles.

Great Lakes EV plugs in as a new source of parts for independent EV repair shops across the Midwest. We source end-of-life EVs and carefully tear down, inspect, test, clean, and categorize all reusable parts according to the Automotive Recyclers Association’s standards. We’re also developing our own standard on EV-only parts (such as HV batteries and drive units) for full transparency and maximum usefulness to our partner shops.

Everything we don’t sell is recycled if at all possible.

Speaking of recycling…

The Recycling Problem

It isn’t just service availability that drives us at GLEV. We’re also acutely aware of the sustainability problem nipping at the heels of the industry: EVs are not being recycled at the rate of ICE cars.

86% of materials in 95% of traditional automobiles are recycled. Automotive recycling is the 16th largest industry in the USA, employing 140,000 people and contributing $25 billion annually to the GDP.

But the recycling industry does not want to take on the business risk of specializing in EVs. They’re new, they’re different, they require special training, and the volume hasn’t been high enough (yet!) to raise the alarm of the large recycling companies.

There’s also evidence that many salvage EVs are exported, meaning that usable vehicles, raw materials, and in many cases federal funds from tax credits, are taken out of the US economy permanently.

In principle, EVs are more recyclable than ICE vehicles, and produce much less waste in their operation and disposal. But somebody needs to put in the work to keep these cars moving through the US supply chain.

Great Lakes EV is committed to doing as much as possible to improve the sustainability of the EV industry through parts reclamation and recycling of materials, as well as sustainable operating principles.

Every damaged component is disassembled into recyclable scrap if possible, and we run our operations as low-waste as we can. Our shop is outfitted with mostly 2nd hand equipment to reduce costs and our carbon footprint. We charge our fleet with solar.

Every HV battery we receive is tested and either resold whole or disassembled into sellable modules. We are still investigating options for end-of-life battery recycling in order to process more vehicles that may have unusable packs.

And while there is extraordinary effort going into HV battery materials recycling, that industry is still in its infancy, and the average end-of-life EV isn’t going to end up at Redwood Materials on its own…