Independent battery grading
Battery is EV’s most valuable part and least trusted.
Every used EV battery in America is priced off one source: what the car says about it. Enduva measures it directly instead, and issues the independent health and safety grade: one number that travels with the pack. Without it, the same pack is an asset to the seller and a liability to everyone else.
ScrollFrom Latin indūrāre, to endure, to last; valēre, to be strong, to be worth; and vīva, living, alive.
Every battery in service.
Almost none of them measured.
Each dot is a battery pack in service today. The orange ones are the fraction anyone has independently graded, about one in a hundred.
No field for the battery.
This is the complete published condition report for a $63,700 electric sedan on a major salvage auction. Odometer, damage, keys, transmission, engine. Fields built for combustion vehicles and never extended.
Legacy schema, not negligence. But the consequence is the same: the largest single component of the vehicle’s value, roughly a third of what it cost to build, has nowhere to be recorded.
It gets worse. The same model can ship with two different battery chemistries, and at end of life one has recycling value in the thousands while the other costs money to get rid of. The listing shows neither. The grade identifies chemistry class along with condition, so a bidder knows which one is on the block.
| Odometer | 0 mi |
| Primary damage | Minor dent / scratches |
| Estimated retail value | $63,700 |
| Has key | Exempt |
| Has engine | Yes |
| Transmission | Automatic |
| Fuel | Electric |
| Battery | — no field — |
The floor rose. The middle fell out.
year on year, Q4 2025
same period
31.2% of ordinary end-of-life volumes in North America and 27.7% in Europe now trade for less than the value of the material inside them. The market is pricing working batteries as scrap, minus handling.
The same lifecycle data says more than half of the EV batteries placed on the market will still be in use beyond their seventeenth year. There is life left in most of them. The price fell anyway, because nobody can separate the wheat from the chaff.
The biggest problem … is really the low residual values of electric cars … I think to a fairly high degree, that depends on not relying on the batteries, not understanding that the battery will last for a very long time.
Health is not safety.
We grade both.
Health asks how much life is left. Safety asks whether it will fail. On real retired packs the two are close to uncorrelated: a pack at 90% health can still carry a one-in-five defect rate. Every incumbent grades the first axis. Nobody issues a transferable grade of the second on a pack that has left the vehicle.
Both come from a single physical measurement taken cold. No operating history, no battery management system, no vehicle attached.
And the grade does not stop at today. Carrying the health axis forward gives time to threshold, which is the question a warranty writer, a bidder and a recycler are all actually asking. That projection is conditional, because how long a pack lasts depends on how it is worked, so it is issued against a stated duty band and it narrows every time the pack is graded again.
A grade has to mean the same thing in two different hands.
Capacity does not. It depends on the cutoff voltage, the rest time and the discharge rate whoever runs the test happens to use, so two honest labs get different answers on the same pack. That is tolerable for a workshop check and fatal for a number an insurer, a lender or a buyer has to rely on.
Enduva measures the battery itself, under conditions held fixed, so a grade issued in one place means what it says in another.
The regulation requires the number.
It does not produce it.
Every electric-vehicle battery and every industrial battery above 2 kWh placed on the EU market must carry a digital passport. It has to record state of health and expected lifetime, stay current, and follow the pack into second life.
For a pack still in a vehicle, the on-board system can supply some of that. For a pack that arrives on a pallet with no vehicle attached, nothing does.
Serious companies read the battery management system, and serious companies sell the instrument. Both serve the party who owns the battery. Neither produces a number the counterparty has a reason to accept.
Every risk market already ends this way: FICO, Carfax, UL, Moody’s. Each exists because two sides of a deal could not agree on a fact, and not one of them builds what it grades.
A third party is going to determine whether this thing is good or bad … and so that’s what I need testing for.
One note when we open up.
Built for the people who carry the risk: insurers, warranty providers, lenders, auctions, and recyclers.
No list, no forwarding.