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"Sticker shock" implies that there will be a moment where people are "forced" to price check. I don't think that assumption holds with EV battery reality. Batt

"Sticker shock" implies that there will be a moment where people are "forced" to price check. I don't think that assumption holds with EV battery reality. Battery degradation isn't a binary state "working"/"broke" like many ICE components that need repairs. Battery degradation is a slow percentage effectiveness drop. It is often qualitative ("the battery is exactly 3% worse than when I bought it ten years ago"), but the "working"/"broke" decision process is still very subjective ("does 3% matter?" "does 7%?") with different people making different choices. But the big thing is that it is a slow shift over time with plenty of time to get used to whatever the new normal is. As the owner you slightly adjust charging stops over time, or you stop trying to hypermile it in quite the same way. A lot of it in subtle ways that you barely notice. There's no "red letter" day that comes where the battery is so much worse than the day before it that you immediately think "time to buy a new battery". Similarly, a person buying a used EV, they may have no idea what "true when brand new 100%" felt like at all. The state they buy that car in is their benchmark, the car has always been at that state for them. That's their "100%", that's the battery state that they expect (and they'll deal with any further slow fall off from their similarly to the previous owner). There's no "sticker shock" moment in any of that. If EVs see a big industry of battery replacements, and right now that's a Big If (because many cars aren't even built to support it and there's no current reason to demand that they need to be), it's going to be a "flipper" market (somewhat similar to home sales). It's going to be the used car middlemen (the auction houses, the used car dealerships, etc) making "sell as-is or flip" type decisions weighing the price that they think they can get in the used car market with the battery as-is versus the price that they think they can get in the used car market with a fresh battery. No person is going to directly see that sticker price. They'll indirectly see it reflected used car prices, but used car dealers don't want "sticker shock" from potential buyers so it'll continue to be sold as just the usual spectrum of used cars and "current market prices" and that may be very indirectly reflected indeed.

logicalmonster 4y ago
When I'm talking about sticker shock, I'm more talking along the lines of the psychology of having an older EV. My thinking (that I might be very wrong about) is that many people are going to eventually realize how much replacing car batteries cost. I don't think most people fully realize that reality right now. I think most people would feel very weird about throwing another $10K+ into an older EV and would view that as wasteful. That's probably going to be reflected into whatever resale and restoration markets exist over a long timeframe. Technically speaking, you make some good points about decaying batteries. They do decay very slightly over time. But I lived with a fading phone battery for a while because it was still barely serving my needs and I was being a little cheap and lazy to bother with getting it fixed. At one point, the battery just decayed enough to stop filling my daily needs and I had a real problem and had to get a replacement quickly. Of course, car batteries and car usage patterns are different than phones, but there does come a day when your batteries die off to the point where it doesn't fill your needs anymore and many people are going to learn that lesson at some point. I personally love the motors in EVs, but I think there's so many problems around their mass usage that society hasn't realized and grappled with yet. Personally I think there's going to be a lot of disappointed EV owners in the future.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  It does sound like you are thinking about it too much like phone battery degradation. EV battery degradation is nothing like that, and trying to analogize from phones makes battery degradation seem like a much bigger deal than reality says it actually is. A giant factor here is that modern phones use passive heat management (they rely a lot on air resistance for cooling rather than finding room/space for fans and coolant) and most EVs use active heat management of one sort or another (they have room for fans/coolant/heaters/etc; and need them for cabin and passenger HVAC anyway). Heat is the biggest impact on degradation. A car does not degrade in the same way that a phone does. Current statistics are that outside of EV models with known bad heat management (many Leafs, early Teslas), degradation is rarely to never a problem and is "always" in single digit percentages of maximum range after 10 to 15 years. (A loss of 7% of a 350 mile range over 10 years is barely 25 miles it drives less per charge, and almost imperceptible a shift at roughly 2.5 miles change per year.) You can argue that current statistics may still be "too early" for statistical significance, especially given that huge caveat that there are entire models that need to be tossed as outliers. But that's also its own indication that early adopters have helped iron out R&D kinks in EV battery heat management and industry standards are only getting better. I know statisticians that think that single digit percentages may even be too big and too pessimistic and that there are a few more outlier car models to toss that haven't been already and that we'll see even better statistical model in a few more years. (ETA: It's also important to note that of the statistical outliers, few have seen battery replacements even post-degradation. There are some Leaf owners that have replaced their batteries, but the vast majority of Leafs still have their first battery in whatever "degraded" state they are in.)

logicalmonster 4y ago

When I'm talking about sticker shock, I'm more talking along the lines of the psychology of having an older EV. My thinking (that I might be very wrong about) is that many people are going to eventually realize how much replacing car batteries cost. I don't think most people fully realize that reality right now. I think most people would feel very weird about throwing another $10K+ into an older EV and would view that as wasteful. That's probably going to be reflected into whatever resale and restoration markets exist over a long timeframe. Technically speaking, you make some good points about decaying batteries. They do decay very slightly over time. But I lived with a fading phone battery for a while because it was still barely serving my needs and I was being a little cheap and lazy to bother with getting it fixed. At one point, the battery just decayed enough to stop filling my daily needs and I had a real problem and had to get a replacement quickly. Of course, car batteries and car usage patterns are different than phones, but there does come a day when your batteries die off to the point where it doesn't fill your needs anymore and many people are going to learn that lesson at some point. I personally love the motors in EVs, but I think there's so many problems around their mass usage that society hasn't realized and grappled with yet. Personally I think there's going to be a lot of disappointed EV owners in the future.

WorldMaker 4y ago
It does sound like you are thinking about it too much like phone battery degradation. EV battery degradation is nothing like that, and trying to analogize from phones makes battery degradation seem like a much bigger deal than reality says it actually is. A giant factor here is that modern phones use passive heat management (they rely a lot on air resistance for cooling rather than finding room/space for fans and coolant) and most EVs use active heat management of one sort or another (they have room for fans/coolant/heaters/etc; and need them for cabin and passenger HVAC anyway). Heat is the biggest impact on degradation. A car does not degrade in the same way that a phone does. Current statistics are that outside of EV models with known bad heat management (many Leafs, early Teslas), degradation is rarely to never a problem and is "always" in single digit percentages of maximum range after 10 to 15 years. (A loss of 7% of a 350 mile range over 10 years is barely 25 miles it drives less per charge, and almost imperceptible a shift at roughly 2.5 miles change per year.) You can argue that current statistics may still be "too early" for statistical significance, especially given that huge caveat that there are entire models that need to be tossed as outliers. But that's also its own indication that early adopters have helped iron out R&D kinks in EV battery heat management and industry standards are only getting better. I know statisticians that think that single digit percentages may even be too big and too pessimistic and that there are a few more outlier car models to toss that haven't been already and that we'll see even better statistical model in a few more years. (ETA: It's also important to note that of the statistical outliers, few have seen battery replacements even post-degradation. There are some Leaf owners that have replaced their batteries, but the vast majority of Leafs still have their first battery in whatever "degraded" state they are in.)