More than one million disposable vapes are thrown away every single day in the United Kingdom. Another 500,000 are thrown out each day in the United States.
Each one contains a fully rechargeable lithium-ion battery — the same type that powers phones, laptops and electric cars. The batteries aren’t dead. They aren’t broken. Yet, they’re discarded after a single use.
That waste drove 26-year-old electronics engineer Chris Doel to attempt something that sounds absurd: powering a road-legal electric vehicle using batteries extracted from 500 disposable vapes.
It worked — and what it reveals about the scale of e-waste piling up in our communities is hard to ignore.
More Than One Million Per Day
Doel, who has 162,000 subscribers on YouTube, didn’t mince words at the start of his video, which he shared on Feb. 28.
“Unfortunately, we seem to live in some crazy dystopia when buying these single-use devices and then chucking them away is completely normalized, despite them having fully-rechargable lithium ion cells inside of them,” he said.
He referenced a 2024 article published by The Guardian suggesting that more than one million vapes are thrown away per day. Not per month. Not per year. Per day.
A 2025 report by the Alaska Environment Research & Policy Center estimated that another 500,000 are thrown out each day in the U.S..
Those discarded vapes don’t vanish. They end up in landfills, in waterways and on sidewalks, leaking lithium and other materials into the environment.
“So, to raise awareness of this ridiculous source of e-waste, I’ve been building increasingly larger things using these extracted cells,” Doel said in the video.
From Power Banks to an Electric Vehicle
This wasn’t Doel’s first project built on vape waste. Last year, he went viral for turning disposable vapes into a fast charge power bank. He then used the batteries to power an e-bike before powering his entire home with them.
Each project escalated the point: these batteries are not trash. They have real, usable energy left in them.
The idea for the car came from one of his subscribers, and Doel ran with it.
“And since you all have been asking for it, I have been crunching the numbers. And I’m pretty sure we can power a road-legal electric vehicle from disposable vape cells,” he said.
He used the same 500-vape “powerwall” that had previously powered his house and was now powering his workshop. The powerwall was made by combining healthy vape batteries to create a 50V massive battery pack with a battery capacity of 2.5 kWh.
Why Not a Tesla?
For the vehicle, Doel chose the Reva G-Wiz, one of the world’s first modern, mass-produced electric cars.
Doel and many others have dubbed it “one of the world’s worst cars.” It has a 17 horsepower motor, weighs about 880 pounds without batteries and tops out at 50 miles per hour.
For reference, most Teslas produce between 450 hp and 670 hp, and weigh approximately 3,500 lbs to over 6,800 lbs.
Doel chose the G-Wiz over a Tesla because of “money” and his “sanity.”
The standard Tesla has a battery capacity of 60 kWh. His vape powerwall, which contains 500 vape batteries and took six months to make, has a capacity of 2.5 kWh.
He would need around 12,000 vape batteries and 12 years to make a powerwall big enough to power a Tesla.
That math lands differently when you consider the waste picture: if more than a million vapes are discarded daily, collecting 12,000 batteries wouldn’t account for a fraction of a single day’s worth.
Making the Vehicle Safe — and Road-Legal
“Back in the early-2000s, the batteries were crap and electric vehicles were unbelievably simple,” Doel said in the video, adding that the G-Wiz ran off a 48V battery pack.
Before hooking up the vape powerwall, Doel had to protect it from the three main reasons it might go up in flames: physical punctures, overvoltage and overheating.
He built an aluminum enclosure to prevent the cells from getting physically damaged. The powerwall already had a battery management system to monitor the voltages. He installed fuses on each cell to protect against overheating, along with temperature probes to monitor the temperature in real-time.
The car already had most of the electrical components needed to run. The only thing Doel needed to install was a DC-DC converter to output 12 volts to power the headlights, wipers, horn and other accessories.
The World’s First USB-C Charged Car
To charge the battery pack, Doel used another one of his inventions, which allows him to charge e-bikes and e-scooters using a standard USB-C fast charger.
Using a standard Macbook charger, he hooked it up to the battery pack and it worked.
That made this the first disposable vape powered car — and the first USB-C charged car.
After plugging the powerwall in, he tested the horn and hazard lights. They worked. He put it in gear and moved a few feet forward. That worked, too. All that was left was taking it to the street.
He took it up to 35 mph, drove around the city on a rainy day with the headlights on, and got around 18 miles before the car powered off.
500 batteries that companies designed to be thrown in the trash produced enough power to drive an actual car 18 miles through city streets.
What We Call ‘Waste’
Doel closed his video with a direct message about the kind of world being left to the next generation.
“I think we all need a big think as to what we actually classify as waste because, sadly, planned obsolescence is becoming more and more common,” he said.
These vape devices aren’t failing or wearing out. They are designed to be used once and thrown away, even though the batteries inside them have plenty of life left.
Doel’s entire series of projects — from the power bank to the e-bike to his home and now this car — demonstrates exactly that.
The waste problem from disposable vapes isn’t abstract. It’s happening at a pace of more than a million devices per day, and the environmental cost is real.
Doel’s video powering a road-legal vehicle from disposable vape batteries is a pointed demonstration that we are throwing away functional, valuable resources on a massive scale — and that the way we think about what counts as “waste” needs to change.
You can watch the video in full here.
Production of this article included the use of AI. It was reviewed and edited by a team of content specialists.
Miami Herald
Ryan Brennan is a content specialist working with McClatchy Media’s Trend Hunter and national content specialists team.
