One Seattle-based startup, Recurrent, aims to do for electric vehicle batteries what odometers do for fuel-powered cars: show the wear and tear on the battery and its future value.
The used car market is more than twice the size of the new car market, and EVs are fast becoming a part of it. That presents a problem when it comes to valuing these cars, which run entirely on batteries. Recurrent uses no hardware, just the software that runs on thousands of electric vehicles daily. It can analyze a car over and over again, normalizing things like weather, driving and charging style in order to compare two similar vehicles and show which has a stronger battery, and consequently a higher value.
As the used EV market grows, this technology, which so far has no U.S. competition, is attractive to investors.