4 ms·

A charge cycle is one full cycling of capacity, such as 0% to 100% once, 30% to 80% twice, or 70% to 80% ten times. I'd be surprised if there are any EV driver

A charge cycle is one full cycling of capacity, such as 0% to 100% once, 30% to 80% twice, or 70% to 80% ten times. I'd be surprised if there are any EV drivers consistently doing a charge cycle every day, outside of commercial vehicles where the battery size was picked to not be any bigger than its daily route.

jandrese 3y ago
It's not that simple. Going from 100% to 0% is far more damaging to the battery than going from 80% to 70%. This is why most EVs are so conservative with their battery usage, they're trying to avoid needing replacement batteries before the rest of the car has fallen apart.
- wlesieutre 3y ago
  Right, just generalizing on how charge cycles are counted, but I'd probably file regular 0-100s into grandparent comment's "(when used outside of extremes)" The average American drives around 13500 miles per year[1], so supposing a car with 250 mile range that's 54 charge cycles, just about one charge cycle per week. The vast majority of that will mostly be with under 20% of a cycle per day, plus a handful of outlier days every year with longer trips. 1000 cycles at 54 cycles per year would be 18.5 years, and 3000 cycles would be 55.5 years. I'm no expert on lithium ion battery aging, but that sounds like it's well into the range where age is more of a problem than cycle count for an average driver. [1] https://www.caranddriver.com/auto-loans/a32880477/average-mileage-per-year/ https://www.caranddriver.com/auto-loans/a32880477/average-mi...
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    My newest car is 20 years old. I refuse to spend what a new car costs when a car costing 10% of that does the job. I don't know what I will do for cars when the battery craps out after 10 years. More and more I think the whole EV concept is a way to make cars that don't last as long but cost just as much if not more, so that automakers can extract more money from their customers
    - wlesieutre 3y ago
      My previous car made it to 18 and I'm hoping to keep its replacement alive as long as possible to see what the track record of car companies looks like for lifespan of their electric cars. It's not just the battery, they're increasingly turning into smartphone-like gadgets. And performance on that type of device never seems to get better as it stretches toward the end of its supported life. Even in the best case automakers are saying things like "we'll give it 15 years of android updates." On the one hand, that's not long enough, and on the other at that 15 year mark I half expect the car will take 30 minutes to launch the maps app because "technically gave you an update" doesn't mean "gave any shits about the user experience on 15 year old hardware." If anything, the battery is the part where there's a possibility of a 3rd party replacement/refurbishment market improving things. Not so easy to replace an EV's infotainment system as it was to swap a single DIN tape deck out for a bluetooth radio.
      - jandrese 3y ago
        It gets even stranger when you think about how some EV companies are pushing autonomous driving so hard. Will the AI driving system be able to run on 20 year old hardware? Or will they have to cut people off and say "oops, the feature you already bought wasn't really possible on your hardware after all, only new cars will get the update." Tesla isn't the only example here, but it is the most egregious.
        wlesieutre 3y ago
        Meanwhile GM is pulling CarPlay from their EVs to make sure when your car gets older and the software is a huge heap of shit, you can't use the car's screen for maps from your 15-years-newer smartphone (or whatever smart-gizmo we're using in 15 years). Want better maps? Buy a new car! I have to hope people will turn around from that and buy their next car from someone other than GM.
      - saltcured 3y ago
        The slow maps app won't matter much when the built-in modem is stuck on 4G or 5G which is being "turned down" in favor of allocating 8G etc., or even before that when it turns out that it depends on some deprecated cloud API and refuses to degrade gracefully. Sometimes I think of my first new car from 1997, which had a tape deck in the dash and an optional CD-changer in the trunk. I was happy to find an aftermarket adapter that converted the CD-changer cabling into an iPod adapter in the following decade. And of course such iPod integrations are all obsolete now. Sometimes I wonder if even Car Play or Android Auto will be just as anachronistic. Imagine if there had been popular Blackberry integrations in the heyday of that product line...

jandrese 3y ago

It's not that simple. Going from 100% to 0% is far more damaging to the battery than going from 80% to 70%. This is why most EVs are so conservative with their battery usage, they're trying to avoid needing replacement batteries before the rest of the car has fallen apart.

wlesieutre 3y ago
Right, just generalizing on how charge cycles are counted, but I'd probably file regular 0-100s into grandparent comment's "(when used outside of extremes)" The average American drives around 13500 miles per year[1], so supposing a car with 250 mile range that's 54 charge cycles, just about one charge cycle per week. The vast majority of that will mostly be with under 20% of a cycle per day, plus a handful of outlier days every year with longer trips. 1000 cycles at 54 cycles per year would be 18.5 years, and 3000 cycles would be 55.5 years. I'm no expert on lithium ion battery aging, but that sounds like it's well into the range where age is more of a problem than cycle count for an average driver. [1] https://www.caranddriver.com/auto-loans/a32880477/average-mileage-per-year/ https://www.caranddriver.com/auto-loans/a32880477/average-mi...
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  My newest car is 20 years old. I refuse to spend what a new car costs when a car costing 10% of that does the job. I don't know what I will do for cars when the battery craps out after 10 years. More and more I think the whole EV concept is a way to make cars that don't last as long but cost just as much if not more, so that automakers can extract more money from their customers
  - wlesieutre 3y ago
    My previous car made it to 18 and I'm hoping to keep its replacement alive as long as possible to see what the track record of car companies looks like for lifespan of their electric cars. It's not just the battery, they're increasingly turning into smartphone-like gadgets. And performance on that type of device never seems to get better as it stretches toward the end of its supported life. Even in the best case automakers are saying things like "we'll give it 15 years of android updates." On the one hand, that's not long enough, and on the other at that 15 year mark I half expect the car will take 30 minutes to launch the maps app because "technically gave you an update" doesn't mean "gave any shits about the user experience on 15 year old hardware." If anything, the battery is the part where there's a possibility of a 3rd party replacement/refurbishment market improving things. Not so easy to replace an EV's infotainment system as it was to swap a single DIN tape deck out for a bluetooth radio.
    - jandrese 3y ago
      It gets even stranger when you think about how some EV companies are pushing autonomous driving so hard. Will the AI driving system be able to run on 20 year old hardware? Or will they have to cut people off and say "oops, the feature you already bought wasn't really possible on your hardware after all, only new cars will get the update." Tesla isn't the only example here, but it is the most egregious.
      - wlesieutre 3y ago
        Meanwhile GM is pulling CarPlay from their EVs to make sure when your car gets older and the software is a huge heap of shit, you can't use the car's screen for maps from your 15-years-newer smartphone (or whatever smart-gizmo we're using in 15 years). Want better maps? Buy a new car! I have to hope people will turn around from that and buy their next car from someone other than GM.
    - saltcured 3y ago
      The slow maps app won't matter much when the built-in modem is stuck on 4G or 5G which is being "turned down" in favor of allocating 8G etc., or even before that when it turns out that it depends on some deprecated cloud API and refuses to degrade gracefully. Sometimes I think of my first new car from 1997, which had a tape deck in the dash and an optional CD-changer in the trunk. I was happy to find an aftermarket adapter that converted the CD-changer cabling into an iPod adapter in the following decade. And of course such iPod integrations are all obsolete now. Sometimes I wonder if even Car Play or Android Auto will be just as anachronistic. Imagine if there had been popular Blackberry integrations in the heyday of that product line...