BMW just put a hard number on how much of a dead car can come back as a new one, and it is easier to misread than to cheer. The company's Car2Car research project reports a 51 percent "recycling rate" from end-of-life vehicles, based on upgraded sorting and smelting applied to hundreds of scrapped BMWs.
That 51 percent figure is already being shared as "half the car gets recycled," which is not what BMW's engineers actually measured. The project tracked which recovered materials are clean and consistent enough to go straight back into automotive production, and where today's recycling system still leaves money and carbon savings on the table.
