Even if you force companies to provide them at cost, they could conceivably end up more expensive than a new car.
If you sell a vehicle model for 5 years, you don't keep the production lines for spare parts around for another 20 years. Instead you predict how much you will need and put that in a warehouse somewhere to ship out over the years. That's naturally expensive, often more expensive than the production cost. Not a massive issue for the smaller stuff, but if you take a part that is massive and makes up a significant fraction of the cost of the vehicle you get headlines like this.
Imho that's a sign it shouldn't be a replacement part, its something that should be serviced and have smaller individual replacement parts (EV battery packs are more than a bunch of cells, after all)
If you sell a vehicle model for 5 years, you don't keep the production lines for spare parts around for another 20 years. Instead you predict how much you will need and put that in a warehouse somewhere to ship out over the years. That's naturally expensive, often more expensive than the production cost. Not a massive issue for the smaller stuff, but if you take a part that is massive and makes up a significant fraction of the cost of the vehicle you get headlines like this.
Imho that's a sign it shouldn't be a replacement part, its something that should be serviced and have smaller individual replacement parts (EV battery packs are more than a bunch of cells, after all)