3 ms·

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)" T

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...
- cogman10 3y ago
  > I don't know what I will do for cars when the battery craps out after 10 years. Not really how batteries tend to degrade. Consider how your cellphone battery degrades. It's not that you one day wake up with a phone that doesn't charge at all, instead the charge simply doesn't last as long. When people talk about the cycle life of batteries, they are talking about the time it takes for battery capacity to go from 100% to 70%. This is also taken from a generally super pessimistic viewpoint (Charging from 0% to 100% == 1 cycle). Pessimistic because lithium ion batteries are somewhat damaged at very low and very high charges. If you get an EV, keep the charge percentage between 40 and 80 (which is usually more than enough for daily use) the battery can last a LOT longer. And that's just talking about NMC batteries. LFP lithium batteries have ~5 to 10x the cyclelife of NMC batteries. I'm currently driving a 2018 tesla model 3 with 120,000 miles. It's got 95% it's original battery capacity. The actual maintenance I've done has been nothing compared to what I've had to do with ICE vehicles. Basically just new tires and windshield wiper fluid. > 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 EVs may have a higher upfront cost, but they aren't making automakers more money. The opposite is true. Now, if I'm cynical, I believe the place automakers will try and shorten the life of EVs is with the software, not the hardware. I've no clue how much longer my EV will get OTA updates.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    It's a car and it runs. Why would it need an update? My ICE car's firmware hasn't been updated since I got it and it still drives fine.
    - wlesieutre 3y ago
      Well you see, it's very important that the UI gets rearranged and laggier every couple of years

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...
cogman10 3y ago
> I don't know what I will do for cars when the battery craps out after 10 years. Not really how batteries tend to degrade. Consider how your cellphone battery degrades. It's not that you one day wake up with a phone that doesn't charge at all, instead the charge simply doesn't last as long. When people talk about the cycle life of batteries, they are talking about the time it takes for battery capacity to go from 100% to 70%. This is also taken from a generally super pessimistic viewpoint (Charging from 0% to 100% == 1 cycle). Pessimistic because lithium ion batteries are somewhat damaged at very low and very high charges. If you get an EV, keep the charge percentage between 40 and 80 (which is usually more than enough for daily use) the battery can last a LOT longer. And that's just talking about NMC batteries. LFP lithium batteries have ~5 to 10x the cyclelife of NMC batteries. I'm currently driving a 2018 tesla model 3 with 120,000 miles. It's got 95% it's original battery capacity. The actual maintenance I've done has been nothing compared to what I've had to do with ICE vehicles. Basically just new tires and windshield wiper fluid. > 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 EVs may have a higher upfront cost, but they aren't making automakers more money. The opposite is true. Now, if I'm cynical, I believe the place automakers will try and shorten the life of EVs is with the software, not the hardware. I've no clue how much longer my EV will get OTA updates.
- fragmede 3y ago
  It's a car and it runs. Why would it need an update? My ICE car's firmware hasn't been updated since I got it and it still drives fine.
  - wlesieutre 3y ago
    Well you see, it's very important that the UI gets rearranged and laggier every couple of years