Until someone comes up with the wallmart of battery sales and works on volume over profit margin there will be no relief in battery buying whether old or new.
There are a number of companies out there selling to car makers that are generating a huge margin at this point even before the feds make everyone go into them.
Here’s a site that may give you a stomach ache:
https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/top-suppliers/ev-battery-manufacturers-companies/
wy69
Someone is going to make a fortune refurbishing EV packs. Usually only one or two cells go “bad” and are flagged by the BMS which triggers a fault and a battery replacement. In reality only those individual cells need to be replaced but not with new cells since the others will try to pull charge from them due to slightly different fully charged voltages. The key is finding similar cells with a range of SOC that matches the over all pack average. Not hard just find a module of similar miles or age and test the cells with a volt/amp ramp test. Modules might be different but the cells are of a standardized cell size and type. Tesla uses 18650 and 21700 cells those are industry standard cylindrical cells. Taking apart a module will yield hundreds of individual cells only one or two would be bad the rest have life left. Test them and match them to other cells of similar use and age reassemble the module and put it back with the other modules. This is not a $40,000 process it’s a few hours in labor and used cells would have a value in the few dollars each otherwise they end up recycled or landfilled.
I just looked my Model 3 with LFP cells has 45,xxxx miles it shows a pack loss of 5% from new. LFP packs in uber service are going 300,000+ miles before 80% pack loss. And those get supercharged on the regular. Mine is a lease so I’m not really worried about cell life it’s interesting to see how it holds up under Texas heat and my lead foot. Mine hardly ever sees a supercharger it gets L2 240V overnight. If the college kid that subleases it for uber drives supercharges it the car will keep a note of it in this charge history so far he hasn’t needed too. One of the Turo rentals did at 50% SOC why I don’t know they didn’t drive more than 50 miles more and brought it back with 70+% SOC I told them they could bring it home with 10% or more. Newbies I guess with range anxiety.