Comment by pornel

I'm not sure about this, because a smaller battery pack with fewer modules needs to work much harder.

PHEV batteries are discharged at higher rate (C) while a BEV can spread the load across many more modules. EV range of PHEV is so small that the battery gets fully cycled daily, while a BEV with similar commute distances and charging can easily keep batteries at a more comfortable state of charge.

The recycling thing doesn't make sense to me. For getting raw materials back the difficulty is the same (get the cells out and grind them), and having more cells per pack should amortize labor cost better.

BEV batteries aren't recycled at scale yet, because there aren't many to recycle. They're easier to reuse for grid storage, since BEV packs already have many modules hooked up to a single BMS.

So this sounds more like Toyota is just supply constrained on batteries.