Texas based battery remanufacturer Samsar recently celebrated the upcycling of its 1,000th Nissan Leaf electric vehicle (EV) battery into stationary storage battery packs.
Founded in 2020 and named after the religious concept of “samsara” – the continuous cycle of life, death, and rebirth – Samsar was created to unlock the full value of lithium batteries and to reduce the number lithium batteries that end up in landfill.
Samsar manufacturers new lithium batteries that can more easily be repurposed at the end of their first service life – part of the concept of Design for Remanufacturing (DfRem), and also partners with EV manufacturers to remanufacture end-of-life EV batteries into new energy storage solutions.
“When I joined the team in 2022, we didn’t know if this was going to work,” said Guillermo Garcia, CEO of Samsar.
“We had this amazing opportunity with Nissan to do something will all the thousands of batteries that were coming out of old Nissan Leafs each year. But every process we developed, every step in building a factory for re-manufacturing EV batteries was new. There was no playbook.
“It was a lot of sweat, tears, and late nights. But we got it done and I am so proud of what our team has achieved here in Sugarland. Hitting one thousand. This is big.”
Samsar has now remanufactured 1,000 battery packs from Nissan Leaf EVs, using a process that captures 90 per cent of the value of each battery pack by downsizing to modules and performing cell-level quality control.
Nissan Leaf batteries are specifically well suited for this sort of remanufacturing process thanks to their air-cooled pack architecture and proven lifetime performance.
Samsar’s role in repurposing end-of-life Nissan Leaf batteries has been so impactful that Kent O’Hara, the former president of Nissan Energy 4R (which stands for reuse, resell, refabricate, and recycle), joined the Samsar Resources board this month.
“At Nissan I saw how hungry the world was for energy and knew that in a few years there was going to be millions of EV batteries that would be headed for recycling,” said O’Hara.
“I knew there must be a way to match the need for power with the growing supply. With this milestone Samsar has proven to be the solution – new energy storage from old cars.”
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