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

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.)