Europe’s first EV battery remanufacturing network on track following award
Europe remains on course to gain an extended network for remanufacturing electric vehicle batteries, just as the first mass-market wave of end-of-life EVs starts to hit the aftermarket. The approach behind it has just been recognised with the newly created Green Award at Automechanika Frankfurt, the world's largest aftermarket trade fair.
The move is being driven by Autocraft Solutions Group, a UK-headquartered specialist in EV battery repair and remanufacture with operations in Grantham and Arnhem, Netherlands. The company sees the coming years as decisive for how the industry handles ageing battery packs. Most of the UK and Europe's mass-market EVs sold from the mid-2010s onwards are only now approaching the end of their first useful life, with volumes expected to accelerate significantly over the next four to five years.
Autocraft's REVIVE® is a proprietary solution for diagnosing, repairing and remanufacturing failed EV battery packs at scale, designed to keep functional cells and modules in service rather than sending packs for premature recycling. Building on its existing UK and Netherlands operations, the company is keen to expand further into key European countries including Germany, Spain, and Italy, reflecting where OEM demand for battery repair capacity is expected to be concentrated.
Until now, batteries that fail in service have typically been replaced outright and very often sent for recycling, regardless of the issue. Autocraft's argument, backed by commercial repair data, is that the majority of failures are localised at cell or module level and that packs can be restored to more than 90% of original performance by replacing only the affected components.
That approach was independently validated at the Automechanika Frankfurt Innovation Awards 2026, where Autocraft's REVIVE® workshops were named winner of the Green Award from 185 global entries assessed by an international panel of judges. This was a new award category that was designed with the aim of recognising Autocraft’s innovation. The recognition effectively endorses remanufacture over unnecessary recycling as the preferred environmental route for handling failed EV batteries.
Across Autocraft's Grantham and Arnhem workshops, between 300 and 400 battery packs a month are being repaired for OEM customers. Figures from the RECOVAS consortium - a UK Government-backed collaboration between vehicle manufacturers, recyclers and academic partners - show that repairing an 82.5kWh pack rather than replacing it avoids around 12 tonnes of CO₂.
Mike Hague-Morgan, Executive Director and Co-Owner of Autocraft Solutions Group, said: "We must wake up to the reality that a replace-and-recycle approach is unsustainable. As the EV parc expands, so too will the number of battery failures, especially as packs age and degrade over time. Yet most batteries can be restored to optimal health, making repair the only logical way forward. The Automechanika Green Award confirms that argument is now being accepted across the industry."
He added: "The next challenge is design. Manufacturers and legislators must work together to ensure future battery designs allow for effective repair, rather than making repair more difficult through increasingly complex architectures. If we do not act now, we risk locking in a throwaway model at exactly the point the volume is about to arrive. Our commitment to expanding remanufacturing capability across Europe reflects that reality."