Samsar upcycles EV battery from 1000th Nissan Leaf

EV battery remanufacturing startup Samsar Resources is celebrating a key milestone: it has now repurposed 1000 Nissan Leaf batteries into new energy storage.

Image: Samsar

According to the US company, it has now returned over 25 MWh of battery capacity ‘to the field’ through its remanufacturing programme. Samsar operates out of a facility in Sugar Land, Texas, where it dismantles Leaf battery packs, tests their individual cells and modules, and refurbishes them for future use. It says it has now reached the 1000-pack milestone after three years of remanufacturing, during which it has experienced an uptick in production; in 2022, it processed just 20 Nissan battery backs, before exceeding 300 in 2025. Samsar now expects to have remanufactured 2000 battery packs in 2027.

Arguing that a battery’s removal from a vehicle is not “the end of its useful life”, the Samsar team assesses the remaining capacity of a battery pack’s individual components before embarking on a process that it claims can capture around 90 per cent of the value of each pack. This is done by reducing the packs to modules then carrying out cell-level quality control. The remanufactured batteries can then be used for a variety of applications including stationary energy storage, marine and worksite power. Samsar has called Nissan Leaf batteries “the perfect fit” for this process thanks to their air-cooled architecture and “well-understood” lifetime performance.

“When I joined the team in 2022 we didn’t know if this was going to work,” said Guillermo Garcia, founder and CEO of Samsar. “We had this amazing opportunity with Nissan to do something with all the thousands of batteries that were coming out of old Nissan Leafs every 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”.

Samsar’s work can be linked to wider efforts to give used Leaf batteries a second life. Earlier this year, electrive reported that 12 decommissioned 30 kWh Nissan Leaf battery packs were being repurposed in a stationary energy storage system at the Port of Vigo in Spain.