Lithium batteries still have limitations with charging at low temperatures. OEMs can design systems that will warm the battery up to a temperature where it can be charged after the car is started, but it’s not nearly as simple as dropping a lead-acid battery in.
Integrate the new-fangled battery (of whatever specific chemistry), the BMS, and the heater into a box with just two posts on top (just like lead acid batteries have had for over a century). It can be designed to take care of itself.
And if it's cheap enough to produce and sell, and offers good enough performance over its normal usable lifespan, then it doesn't need a diagnostic interface for sorting out issues any more than a lead acid car battery does today.
I looked at it and couldn’t find any that offered enough cranking amps. I’m not sure how easy it would be to design a lifepo4 battery for the application.
Lithium batteries are more than capable of starting cars, and at a fraction of the size (just look up "car starters" and the like on Amazon - those are usually a tiny lithium battery that you pull 50c from). The thing is they are usually much pricier for an equivalent size battery and have problems in the cold that make them unsuitable in some climates.
The environment be damned: Regarding price / energy density, yes. They even have weight / energy density advantage.
But Lithium batteries can't be recycled. Saying "We are almost there" and "The future looks bright about it" is "moving fast and breaking things" again
Recovering lithium from batteries is not cost effective compared with mining new lithium. However, battery recycling is possible and still worth doing, because it recovers more valuable metals such as cobalt or copper.
And before recycling, reusing! This is why at https://gouach.com we've built the first easy-to-repair, easy-to-swap-cell battery! We're launching a Kickstarter soon, stay tuned (on our newsletter!)
I was wrong for posting what really means "technically not possible"
The real barrier for recycling waste is sustainability. This is the reason why e.g. TETRABRIK is considered recyclable, but it is actually not (I am posting about this parallel because it has been completely understood for several years)
Anything can be recycled if we are pedantic. But will it actually stop generating waste? (or will they be silently exported ignored?) Will subsidies be sustainable? (not it even asking if it can be profitable) In reality, the "recyclable" brand is for the most part greenwashing.
Now, the business ad about a venture capital bussiness you posted is nothing new. Last year there were 5 such touted recycling plants in Latin America, already. One of them is located in Costa Rica. Costa Rica doesn't have a Lithium battery waste issue. There, the electric cars are very few (and people who got them already want out), there are no electricity storage facilities. I am guessing here that they will import a ton (hundreds of tons) of waste from "Somewhere else"
I am including an article on battery recycling that is easy to read. It is only 40 pages long.