3 ms·

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)

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.)

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.)