EV batteries are massively easier to recycle than almost any other e-waste.
Depends, are they a typical pack made with a relatively small number of prismatic cells?
Why the heck would you try to build a car battery that way? You'll never be able to get adequate cooling with that sort of design, and the battery life expectancy will suck. Don't believe me? Look at the original Nissan Leaf to see just how well a battery pack without active cooling holds up in the real world.
Or are they one of these bullshit packs made by Tesla with 403875342087 connections because they are made out of a shitload of little cells? Even in fucking R/C cars we don't use cylindrical cells any more and haven't for decades, packs are all made out of pouches (usually 2-4 of them) instead of cylinders (which required 6-12 cells.)
You can get away with not having active cooling when you have a small number of pouch cells. You can't get away with that when you're talking about a 300V to 400V pack that gets charged at up to a 250 kW charge speed (roughly 625 to 825 amps).
And remember that the amount of current involved determines the size of wiring required. At lower voltage, you need higher amperage to get the same amount of power out of the pack. So if you lower the number of cells in series, the wiring in the car gets bigger, and the charge cable gets thicker and harder to plug in.
Also, car batteries are built underneath the car. You have to have a lot of mechanical structure to ensure that road debris cannot puncture the battery in any way. Pouch cells don't handle impacts well, which means you would end up building more structure around them to provide adequate protection, and you'd likely negate much of the win.
Besides, cylindrical cells are much, much cheaper per kWh and it isn't as though you need to reclaim the space for anything. The floorboard of your car has to exist either way. So the only reason to even consider pouch cells would be to increase the capacity of the battery without increasing its size, and doing so would massively inflate the cost, so it wouldn't really make a lot of sense to do that, typically, except perhaps in some specialized use case (e.g. tow vehicles), and maybe not even then.
People lauded Tesla for their use of existing technology but those packs are a big part of why Tesla batteries have a high failure rate, they have too many connections in them. And that complexity will also make them more expensive to recycle.
Tesla batteries *don't* have a high failure rate. The oldest design for the Model S wasn't as good thermally, so just shy of 4% of Model S packs have failed over the last 12 years at last check. The Model X, released just four years later, has only about a .79% battery failure rate over 8 years. A typical Tesla pack is expected to last at least 500k miles, and possibly a million or more.
No, it's all the other companies who are screwing up their EV batteries and having high failure rates, presumably because they're trying to do something cute to save money, rather than sticking with well-tested, well-researched tech.