10 ms·

How much do electric car batteries degrade?

135 points by xnx 1y ago

toomuchtodo 1y ago
Great post. Minor quibble: the data shows fast DC charging does not have a material impact on battery pack health longevity. TLDR These batteries are going to outlast the vehicle chassis. Full Speed Ahead: EV Study Reveals Impacts of Fast Charging - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37330024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37330024 - August 2023
- jayknight 1y ago
  >This is a fairly common fear for people considering a new EV: “Won’t the battery need to be replaced after a few years?”. And I think it’s even more prominent in the second-hand market: “Oh, I’d never buy a second-hand battery!”. I will admit that both of these are nagging on me. I fully intend for my next car to be an EV, but if I was buying today, this would be a factor. I drive a 2013 Camry (that I got used) that shows no signs of slowing down. I hope to drive it for at least a few more years. If the car is still reliable when it's time to send a kid in it to college, that's probably when I'll start looking for something new. And you can show me studies all day long, but my irrational brain is just worried that I won't be able to get 15+ years out of an EV because there just aren't that many 15 year old EVs driving around today.
  - geoffeg 1y ago
    Don't forget that internal combustions engines lose power and efficiency over their lifetimes. Bearings, piston rings and other components wear, injectors and valves get dirty, surfaces develop varnish, etc. My last ICE car started needing a quart of oil every few months and that was with very good maintenance and not being driven hard. I've been curious about how the degradation compares to EVs. I'm aware it's different kind of wear and that there's different ways to mitigate and repair EVs vs ICE, but they both have their own lifetimes and loss of performance.
    - lpedrosa 1y ago
      I believe the difference between ICE degradation and EV degradation is that the EV one actually affects the car's range. While it is true that your car might consume more oil, and some other component might need replacing, its range, assuming it has been serviced properly, should be similar to what you could get out of it new. I do wonder if the sum of the costs of getting the ICE car back to mint condition will be the same as getting some cells replaced so you get full range again.
      - PaulKeeble 1y ago
        They definitely loose fuel efficiency over time, so they go less far on the same filled fuel tank. Its not as dramatic as a 20% loss but its not nothing either.
      - nicoburns 1y ago
        > While it is true that your car might consume more oil, and some other component might need replacing, its range, assuming it has been serviced properly, Well, until it dies completely (or to the point that servicing it would be more expensive to repair than replace). Then it's range abruptly drops to 0. We won't know for sure until we have more older EVs, but it may well be that EVs last much longer than that at 70-80% range. Which, especially if starting ranges increase, may be a very useful amount of range.
      - neogodless 1y ago
        It's true we can't shake mainstream obsession with range, but I also think most people are a bit hesitant to take their 175,000 mile gasoline cars on long road trips. Not because of range, but because it just might break. So old EVs can be just like old gas cars - used around town rather than for long road trips.
        sokoloff 1y ago
        We road tripped our 2005 240K+ mile CR-V 750 miles each way every Christmas without a worry. We’d still be road-tripping in that if a negligent Subaru driver hadn’t rear-ended us and pushed us into a Prius ahead as the middle car in a sandwich. The car before that was a 1998 Mercedes diesel with 225K+ miles on it that retired only because of body rust not mechanicals. It helps that I did all the maintenance, so I knew how reliable they were. Cars are insanely reliable and people get irrationally fearful when a car turns 100K and then again at 200K.
  - nicoburns 1y ago
    > Just purchased a 2015 Tesla Model S 70D for $9k (USD). It was very worth it. It still holds about 88% of its charge after 175k miles. There are also some positive factors you didn’t mention. The top commenter from the post just purchased a 10 year old EV that they judge to be perfectly good and unlikely to die on them soon. I do think the anxiety about batteries is somewhat justified today, because the capacities are small enough that only have 80% capacity available could be a problem. But once the batteries are larger, I suspect EVs will actually last significantly longer than ICE cars on average.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    I own a 2018 Model S with ~140k miles on it. I have primarily Supercharged it, and have driven it across the continental US several times. It has only lost 8-10% of original range. I get it, lifecycle anxiety is to be expected, but the evidence is fairly robust these batteries will last (and at least in the case of Tesla and my use case, I have an aftermarket person I work with in North Carolina who can provide me refurbished packs if needed). Here is a 2018 Model S with 400k miles on it, although it's original battery was replaced under warranty: https://insideevs.com/news/717654/tesla-model-s-400k-mile-battery/ https://insideevs.com/news/717654/tesla-model-s-400k-mile-ba... (I tried to import a BYD vehicle to the US, with an unfavorable outcome)
    - hadlock 1y ago
      Your car is only 70% of the way through it's nominal lifespan. It seems like battery life is holding up well, but we'll find out a lot more as many of these cars begin their second decade of service, quite often with less rigorous maintenance. I suspect many/most EVs will make it to 300k and 12 years, but the oldest (truly) mass produced Model S are only just now turning 10 years old.
      - toomuchtodo 1y ago
        Certainly, we should keep collecting more data, but the longevity and lifecycle trajectory is obvious. https://spectrum.ieee.org/ev-battery-life https://spectrum.ieee.org/ev-battery-life https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01698-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01698-1 https://old.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1jvwi14/german_automobile_association_adac_statistics_evs/ https://old.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1jvwi14/g... https://www.thejubjubbirds.com/hit-and-run-on-the-energy-transition-highway/the-last-car-youll-ever-own https://www.thejubjubbirds.com/hit-and-run-on-the-energy-tra...
- SubiculumCode 1y ago
  My other quibble is when the author says the majority of cars are scrapped at 150k-200k..if this excludes wrecked vehicles, I suspect most are sold to used markets, even foreign used markets, not scrapped.
  - Animats 1y ago
    Not so much any more.[1] US used vehicle exports are down at least 2/3 since 2008. China is making so many cheap new cars that used US cars are no longer needed. Most scrapped cars in the US are chopped up into little pieces, run through a separator for steel, aluminum, and everything else, and end up at a steel mill to be made into new steel. In Silicon Valley, the chopping and initial separation plant is at the Port of Redwood City. [1] https://www.trade.gov/data-visualization/used-vehicle-trade-data-visualization https://www.trade.gov/data-visualization/used-vehicle-trade-...
kingstnap 1y ago
I think batteries aging as much as they do is a thing we will be able to solve. Dr. Jeff Dahn's talks on YouTube were really striking in how much a bit of chemistry and charging management gets you. https://youtu.be/i31x5JW361k?si=JdjJD_Lzg4qsY84C https://youtu.be/i31x5JW361k?si=JdjJD_Lzg4qsY84C
- ZeroGravitas 1y ago
  His latest visit to the channel was 12 days ago: https://youtu.be/oc3XgCfQfXs https://youtu.be/oc3XgCfQfXs
colechristensen 1y ago
Having studied battery lifetimes in an engineering context for a significant amount of time I've regularly wondered how much of the slow battery degradation in these car battery packs is "cheating". That is how much of the battery capacity is hidden by the battery management system when the car is new and then slowly doled out as the battery ages to make for the appearance of very slow degradation even though the individual raw cells would be wearing out quite a bit faster? If this were true what you would see is after this excess capacity was exhausted would be battery capacity falling off a cliff eventually, though this data seems to show a couple hundred thousand miles of consistent capacity with no cliff. SSDs do a similar thing for capacity and wear with a sizable proportion of capacity reserved to replace bad blocks as the SSD ages. Whenever I make this comment almost everyone responding is just guessing about how I'm wrong and new chemistries are so much better, etc.
- barbegal 1y ago
  Yeah as far as I can see all the companies that study EV batteries and provide degradation reports etc. all do so by using the data from the manufacturer. I would trust data about battery degradation a lot more if the data came from an independent data logger, logging voltage and current.
- neogodless 1y ago
  I'm a bit confused as you're saying this article refutes your hypothesis, right? I'll also offer up an example. The Polestar 2 (prior to 2024) has an advertised 78 kWh battery, but also clearly only 75 kWh available for use. That's about 96% right from the factory. So presumably it's doing what you're saying, but it's also not a secret. It's also a way to prevent regular 100% charges from happening, which have proven to accelerate degradation.
  - colechristensen 1y ago
    Their data fit on the extracted (supposedly real) data between 100k and 300k km suggests that you could drive around the planet 5 times while losing only a few percent of total battery capacity and I don't believe that raw cells behave that way regardless of recent improvements.
bangaladore 1y ago
I think we (sorry I) have seen that degradation has not the concern, it's the pack engineering that is an issue by a large margin. Tesla's packs first produced in 2017/18 for the model 3 represented largely the industry's first mass produced packs that will largely fail naturally, not due to pack engineering issues (failed cells, leaks, cooling, etc...). Before that required a much higher pack replacement rate, and other manufacturers have the same issues.
- LtWorf 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - bangaladore 1y ago
    Care to provide constructive feedback/information then rather than a pedantic correction?
    - LtWorf 1y ago
      The comment I responded to was just about one person feelings, trying to involve everyone else in their feelings, it provided no information or way to validate those feelings, hence my response.
    - mft_ 1y ago
      It’s not a pedantic correction, it’s a relevant anecdote to the contrary.
      - bangaladore 1y ago
        I'd disagree for a couple reasons: 1. We in English can mean different things, from you and I to a broader group. Focusing only on that word without addressing the actual point comes off as a language correction. 2. The original comment made several claims about degradation, pack engineering, and industry history. Ignoring those to focus only on wording misses the main discussion. If the responder focused on a given claim that they refute, that's perfectly fine. They didn't.
kulahan 1y ago
Wow, I did not expect anyone to be offering a SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND mile warranty on their batteries. That's some serious confidence. I didn't see anything about it transferring, though. That would be smart on their end - the resale value for electric sports cars at least, is about 50% in the first year, then it levels off hard after that. This would encourage buying new, but not aftermarket. I'll have to look into this. Still, while this removes a primary concern of mine, there's still one major hurdle that cannot be bypassed as far as I can tell (yet): If you have shared parking, there's essentially no way to charge your car. Maybe if it's an outdoor parking lot you can rely on solar power somewhat, assuming you're in a good situation for that? Still, my point is that my parking space isn't actually mine, so I can't modify anything in the garage. Assuming superconductors aren't figured out any time soon, this appears to be an impossible solve, which cuts their consumer market significantly. Also, not exactly the same thing, but they could remove those warranties and instead get some nice replaceable battery cells in there. Let me turn a thing to unlock it, pull out that one cell, and replace it. But maybe I'm a little more wrench-y than their customers want to be?
- nicoburns 1y ago
  > If you have shared parking, there's essentially no way to charge your car. The neighbourhood I used to live in London (where almost nobody has off-street parking) installed chargers into lamp posts. This BBC article has more details and photos https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67518869 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67518869
- stetrain 1y ago
  Home charging in shared parking scenarios is difficult. Municipalities can add curbside chargers and in some places this is fairly common. In a private condo or apartment scenario you'd need the owner or association to agree to install them. A second option is more slow chargers installed places your car spends a lot of time parked, like offices or transit stations if you park and ride. A third option is using a fast charger somewhere you go once or twice a week. Like grocery stores, gyms, etc. Costco for example is adding fast chargers to their stores, which should be fast enough for a full charge by the time you actually get in and out of Costco. Replacing cells in a pack can be difficult. You want all the cells in the pack to have roughly the same capacity and voltage curve, so that you can connect them all together and charge them at the same time. GM says that their Ultium batteries are segmented into modules, which each module having its own Battery Management System, and that it supports mixing and matching modules of different degradation and even cell chemistry. But anything that adds complexity to the pack beyond being cells packed in as densely as feasible is going to add costs and reduce maximum energy storage. I think the long term answer here is that there will eventually be a used and remanufactured battery pack market for popular models, just like you can get a used or remanufactured engine today.
cuttothechase 1y ago
>> That’s not bad, given that most cars are scrapped somewhere in the 150,000 to 200,000 miles range. At that point, a Tesla will have more than 80% of its initial capacity, and in some cases, even more. So people will probably give up their car, well, well before the battery gets close to becoming a burden. Can they not see that this is because of correlation and not causation. Why would an EV be given up at 150 - 200K when it has much less moving parts and stressors compared to the traditional ICE based vehicles?
- stetrain 1y ago
  Some things will still add up. Someone who might be shopping in the price range for a used car with 100,000 miles might also see a car with 200,000 miles that needs brakes (probably for the first time in an EV's life), shocks, bushings, CV joints, A/C service, or possibly corrosion repair/mitigation in some climates, might choose to trade or scrap over spending those repair costs. Also there becomes a crossover point of residual value where a car involved in an accident becomes cheaper to total than to repair, which is probably what takes a lot of cars off the road. That mileage may stretch longer if the important parts of an average EV drivetrain can run without major service for significantly longer than the average ICE drivetrain, which seems like a likely possibility.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- 1970-01-01 1y ago
  Rust, collision, part availability, and newer safety tech are all reasons to scrap an old EV. I hope manufacturers realize this and make the battery easy for DIY removal, similar to removing the catalytic converter from your rusty and bent ICE vehicle is the big moneymaker.
  - WorldMaker 1y ago
    As a low mile driver with a tendency to hold on to cars, it would also probably surprise people how much the average life of plastics are closer to the 15-20 year mark, especially when regularly handled by people. Things like plastic knobs and buttons can break in interesting ways that a lot of people wouldn't expect. We tend to think of plastics as "forever chemicals" because we hear that term a lot, but it's not that plastic is particularly rugged against regular use across time, it's that how it breaks down is awful (see all the discussions of microplastics; it break down and then becomes a part of ecosystems in disturbing ways). (ETA: Also the EV is so much more the "software-defined" car than anything, and the lifecycle of software versus tech debt and long term maintenance is going to be a large issue, even though the cars are mechanically simpler, the software is something making up for that in its complexity.) > I hope manufacturers realize this and make the battery easy for DIY removal This seems to be the case so far. A lot of scrapped cars' batteries seem to be going directly into second use in a second car. A lot of the manufacturers are also prepared for future "power wall" secondary uses of depleted batteries, but so far there has been too much of a market for the used batteries in second cars for used (even depleted) batteries to build a "power wall" market for used batteries. (Tesla's brand of that concept that sounds a lot like the generic term so far has almost exclusively been using new batteries for their products. Nissan's brand that no one has ever heard of, dedicated to used batteries only, has scarcely built or sold anything and is in danger of shutting down as an effort.) The economics of used EV batteries is already a fascinating thing to watch, and something we'll probably see get more interesting rather than less.
bdcravens 1y ago
Most important point is comparing it to loss of efficiency in gas cars. There's a lot more variance there, given the work that a gas engine done and all the ways it can be maintained (and lack thereof), but most numbers I've seen point to around 10-15% after 100k miles.
- Hamuko 1y ago
  15% efficiency loss doesn't sound that major. My car's currently averaging 7.9 l/100km. It it goes up to 9.0 l/100 km, it means that I need to buy an additional 5.5 litres of petrol over 500 km driven, which is around 10€.
  - b112 1y ago
    I won't happen. Gas cars don't lose efficiency like that, so don't concern yourself.
- epolanski 1y ago
  My 200k+ kilometers diesel Fiat Punto is as efficient as new.
- sokoloff 1y ago
  I track gas added to all of our cars (because my dad and his dad did). I’ve driven several of them to over 130k miles and one to 242k miles. I’ve never seen even a 5% degradation in mileage from wear. (I did see the ~3% drop in mileage when ethanol was added to the standard gasoline mix. I wonder if someone is confusing that for wear.) If I had a 10% loss in fuel economy, I’d be looking for something wrong and fixing it.
  - mlhpdx 1y ago
    I can second this, and do the same math and tracking (someday maybe cars will reliably do this themselves). The same can be done for electrics (power paid for and delivered to the car versus the miles driven).
  - b112 1y ago
epolanski 1y ago
> But not many cars get to this driving distance That's just because they don't receive appropriate maintenance. In my family we had plenty of Italian and german cars, we maintained them, most hit 300k+ kilometers. Our 9000$ Lancia Y still worked fine after 350k+ and we only got rid of it because it cannot enter Rome due to emission restrictions.
- jacobgorm 1y ago
  Italian cars work great in the warm and dry Italian climate, but have historically had trouble with corrosion in colder climates that they were not built for. My dad loved Alfa Romeo’s, but none of them lasted very long in Denmark. In other words YMMV.
  - skylurk 1y ago
    https://xkcd.com/3123/ https://xkcd.com/3123/
    - tshaddox 1y ago
      I believe the phrase was originally about "mileage" as in fuel economy (i.e. miles per gallon), but "total mileage" (i.e. odometer reading) is pretty close!
      - skylurk 1y ago
        True! Nice pun, jacobgorm :)
    - retox 1y ago
      Please don't do this, you aren't adding anything to the conversation
  - Hamuko 1y ago
    We had an Alfa Romeo and it did not enjoy -20°C. That model has almost completely disappeared from the market after 20 years, with the remaining ones usually being sold as projects or for parts. I think they also had problems with timing belts? Google results are suggesting me that they had to halve the change interval, possibly because of our shitty roads. Volvo belts also last for 10 years in their native Sweden but only 5 years here.
scheisshausDan 1y ago
[dead]
mlhpdx 1y ago
The study data showing average capacity is helpful, but the lower quartile and even more so the bottom 10% is really what people worry about. In the used car market the presence of even a decidedly small number of “lemons” has a significantly detrimental price impact.
loudmax 1y ago
When I bought my Prius in 2010, the longevity of the traction battery was a concern. A month ago, when I finally sold it to a garage, that car had over 190,000 miles on the odometer. I sold it because the transmission needed some repair work. The battery and the engine were still going strong.
- jdlshore 1y ago
  To be fair, I’m pretty sure the 2010 Prius uses a completely different battery chemistry than modern electric cars. (I think it’s NiCad, but I’m not 100% sure on that.)
  - eddyvedder 1y ago
    NiMH
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
    NiMH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius_(XW30) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius_(XW30) NiCads suck, you find NiCads in like old AA rechargeables and cheap toothbrushes. I don't know for sure if NiMH last longer than Li-Ion but I've had much the same experience with my Prius - Old as hell and everything but the battery failing
    - ilamont 1y ago
      Same for ours, a 2010 model. It's 15 years old and the battery and electronics work fine, even the GPS system. It's the other stuff that needs fixing: A/C, exhaust, various pumps, etc.
    - frogblast 1y ago
      My prius (2006 model) finally had the traction battery (NiMh) start to loose modules at about 250K miles. It was clearly getting weaker, but drivable at that time. Then Covid hit, and it sat for 2 months without being driven / charge cycled. That pushed it over the edge. That isn't predictive at all of NMC or LFP chemistries though (and I'm not going through multiple charge cycles per drive), but a fun anecdote. It was an entertaining project opening up the battery pack and identifying/replacing the bad modules. In the end, other parts of the car were dying too, and the final straw was California's refusal to allow aftermarket catalytic converter replacements, and the Toyota's price (with no competition) was more than the vehicle was worth. So far my two EVs, both NMC chemistry (Kia and Rivian) are at 80,000 and 30,000 miles respectively, with no noticeable degradation.
gwbas1c 1y ago
I just traded in a 6.5 year old model 3 with 75k miles. Battery was at 87% of capacity. The big problem was cold snaps. It had the older heating system and would lose a lot of charge in the cold. Our 2022 Model Y with the newer heating system doesn't lose nearly as much charge in cold snaps.
- ai-christianson 1y ago
  does the newer one use a heat pump?
  - Kirby64 1y ago
    Yes, they do. All the newer teslas use heat pumps (as well as most other EVs these days).
    - dzhiurgis 1y ago
      A lot of them it’s still optional which says a lot about their small scale.
  - xeromal 1y ago
    Yeah, the old one heated the battery through similar tech as heated seats. I think the only problem with the tesla heat pump is that it doesn't function well below 20-30F. I'm not sure if that's all heat pumps.
    - torginus 1y ago
      Well, the problem with the heat pumps in my house, is that near or below freezing temperatures, the outdoor unit has the tendency to freeze over, then either it has to run its resistive heater, or intermittently cut out and blow some cold air inside. It's rather uncomfortable. I'm not sure you can get away with a design that has to sporadically turn itself off, and melt itself down in an EV.
      - 1y ago
copirate 1y ago
How can you tell how much battery capacity is left?
- avhon1 1y ago
  Any decent battery system measures the current that goes into the battery, and the current that goes out. Off-the-shelf ICs "learn" the battery's initial capacity and its state-of-charge to voltage curve, and thereon can observe degredation below those initial measurements, as well as fairly accurately reporting how much energy is in the battery at any given moment.
shawnz 1y ago
> But the types and structures of electric car and mobile phone batteries are not the same. Car batteries are designed to last far longer. What prevents the same advancements from being applied to phone batteries?
- chankstein38 1y ago
  Planned Obsolescence.
- speedgoose 1y ago
  Phones don’t have active cooling, or just proper cooling. Heavy usage and charging will heat up the battery a lot. A warm battery at a high state of charge will deteriorate fast. Also, they aren’t designed to last very long. One manufacturer could reduce the max voltage in the BMS (battery management system), or reduce the charging speed at high states of charges, to significantly increase the lifetime of the battery but they somehow don’t. Though you start to see some phone limiting their charge.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- carelyair 1y ago
  Phone batteries are cheaper so less motive to invest in changing the supply chains for a different design.
- kingstnap 1y ago
  Battery degradation isn't really a function of use as much as its a function of abuse. Phone's are designed to drive their batteries hard. If you are gentle about charging it slowly and keeping it in the 30-80% state of charge region it will last a long time. The worst thing you can do is aggressively charge it to full and drain it till dead constantly. It will last a few hundred cycles before it gets seriously degraded. A lot of people unfortunately (fortunate for smartphone companies) do exactly that (you know that person in your life who's phone is always dead?).
  - 1y ago
starwatch 1y ago
> At that point, a Tesla will have more than 80% of its initial capacity, and in some cases, even more. So people will probably give up their car, well, well before the battery gets close to becoming a burden. I looked into the secondhand EV market (in Norway). In doing so I read quite a bit of academic research to figure out the lifetime of an EV. Apparently the 80% capacity is the accepted end of life for an EV battery: "For batteries, 80% of the initial capacity is referred to as the point after which it tends to exhibit an exponential decay of capacity and is considered an unreliable power source after this point for EV application" [1] So, the Tesla the article talks about won't be much good, or at least not for very long. [1]: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3271287 https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3271287
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  That's statistical. A small number will start their exponential degrade at 80%, but most won't. Some might get to 60% before they start it. So if you're at 83% at 200,000 miles you don't really know whether you have 50,000 more or you have 200,000 more on the battery. And "exponential degrade" doesn't mean it's particularly fast. It means it's faster to degrade from 80 to 60 than it is from 100 to 80. You're not going to get 500,000 miles out of driving until the battery hits 60% but you might get a substantial fraction. The rest of the car almost certainly doesn't have 200,000 more miles in it, so who cares?
  - _carbyau_ 1y ago
    > The rest of the car almost certainly doesn't have 200,000 more miles in it, so who cares? This what I find curious. It used to be cars were largely limited by their main driveline components. Now those components have been simplified. In a lot of the BYD cars it is literally the exact same driveline so for them it is almost commoditised. My part of the world sees no snow or salt. So if the body is fine and the driveline is fine.... Why can't I run a car for a million miles and simply replace coils, struts, hubs, bearings, carpets, seats, the-tiny-electric-motors-that-drive-windows-and-seats-and-mirrors etc? IE where is the electric version of the old landcruiser series?
fencepost 1y ago
For the comparison to phone batteries, it's worth noting that until the last few years few if any phones allowed capping charge below 100% but now iPhones (15 and higher?), many or all Samsungs and unknown others allow capping for battery health. For the Samsung devices, the ability to do this came somewhere around the time they started promising 5 years of OS and/or security updates. I'm pretty sure Tesla early on 'sold' an optional range extension that simply allowed you to charge the batteries further for extra range, with part of that cost presumably covering an anticipated higher battery failure rate. IIRC there were also some times when there were hurricanes coming during which they OTA unlocked that for everyone in the affected regions as well to facilitate evacuations.
- tzs 1y ago
  > For the comparison to phone batteries, it's worth noting that until the last few years few if any phones allowed capping charge below 100% but now iPhones (15 and higher?), many or all Samsungs and unknown others allow capping for battery health. Apple also added that the the M4 iPad Pro and M2 iPad Air. For those with an iPhone or iPad that does not support this there is a way to hack it. I got this from a comment here on HN many months ago, but don't remember who wrote it. Apple Shortcuts automations can be trigged by battery level. Plug your charger into a smart outlet that can be controlled from Shortcuts, and simply make an automation that runs when the battery level goes above 80% that turns off the outlet. If you want to even more closely match what Apple does on the devices with the 80% limit support built in also make a shortcut that turns on the outlet when the battery level goes below 75%. Some smart plugs work better with Shortcuts than others. For example for an Amazon smart plug by understanding is that what you would have to do is make a routine to turn off the plug in the Alexa app. Then you would have to use a third party service like IFTTT to invoke the Alexa routine from a Shortcut. A TP-Link Tapo plug is a little easier. You still have to set up the plug in the Tapo app, but the Tapo app includes Shortcuts integration so Shortcut actions to turn Tapo devices on and off automatically appear in Shortcuts. That's still not perfect because you need to be logged into the Tapo app. I find that I occasionally get logged out (not sure if it just periodically logs you out or it happens on app updates) and then the Shortcut breaks until you log back in. I've found two ways to deal with that: 1. If it breaks the consequence is that night my iPad charges to 100%. You are supposed to do that occasionally anyway to keep the battery level indicator calibrated, and this is a convenient way to do that. If I wake up and the iPad is at 100%, I go log into the Tapo app. 2. I've got a Shortcut on my desktop to turn on the Tapo plug. I use that to turn it on before charging the iPad. If it doesn't turn on I know it is time to log in again. This way I only get the "fails to turn off" situation if I get logged out between the time I go to bed and the time the iPad passes 80%. I handle the need to occasionally charge to 100% by noticing when my iPhone 15 charges to 100% and then plugging the iPad into a non-smart outlet that night. Best would be to get a plug that works with Shortcuts without needing to use the vendor's app and without needing an internet connection. I thought that would be the Tapo because they can be set up as Matter devices, but after buying it I learned that this requires a Matter contoller and maybe a Thread border router. I have a couple of Amazon Echo devices that may be Matter controllers, but it turns out you need a controller for each platform (Alexa, Google, HomeKit) that you want to control the device from, so my Echos would not help with using a Matter device from Shortcuts. My next step on the Matter path when I get some time is to look at Home Assistant. My understanding is that it can act as a Matter controller, and that the Home Assistant mobile app can has Shortcut integration on iOS. That should let me use the Tapo in Matter mode, and to replace the Tapo app and its annoying login requirement with the Home Assistant app.
tzs 1y ago
> Most manufacturers offer a warranty somewhere in the range of 8 to 10 years, and 100,000 miles. That usually means that if your battery is below 70% health within either 8 years or 100,000 miles, they’ll replace it for you. This disagrees with pretty much every other source I've been able to find. An N year/M mile warranty is good until whichever of N years or M miles you hit first.
- rconti 1y ago
  The quote you reference doesn't make a distinction either way.
  - gerdesj 1y ago
    Well played Sir. My MG4 (Saic) has a five year warranty and rather a lot of small print, that I should probably OCR and pass through Chat for a summary and then read myself. I do know it will last longer than my last car - a Ford Focus with an Eco boost abomination of an engine. The engine oil warning gauge thing decided to only kick in at just above the bottom level on the dipstick. Even so all should have been fine. I even drained and replaced the lot. This was a three year old car. It degraded over about a month and eventually passed away in Bristol. I live in Yeovil, a good hour away. My first car was an elderly Mk1 Ford Fiesta (it was old in 1994). That often managed to run without any oil for some time because it had ended up as a rusty stain with the contents of the radiator on the underside of the bonnet (hood) and on the road.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - tzs 1y ago
    Doesn't it? It says: > That usually means that if your battery is below 70% health within either 8 years or 100,000 miles, they’ll replace it for you. Consider a car with 200k miles at 5 years. 5 years is within 8 years, so I don't see any way of reading "within either 8 years or 100k miles" that would not make that car covered. Similar for a car that is 15 years old with 50k miles. But everything I've seen elsewhere says the warranty applies as long as you are within 8 years and within 100k miles.
tonymet 1y ago
Electric owners under-value the last 20% of their battery. That is the most important 20% If you are running out of "gas" , every lost mile is a mile walking (or being towed). that last 20% of range is the difference between making it to the next charger or being dead on the road. And with electric it's a bigger burden because they can't be refilled with gasoline. As a practical example, my recent charging forecast dropped from 12% to zero % during the drive (this was controlled for consumption, ambient temps, driving speed etc). We finally arrived with 3% on the battery. So that means in a year, we will not be able to make that exact same drive. That is a problem needing addressed. I've also not heard great things with the warranties. It seems people struggle to redeem compensation via warranty. And the qualifying conditions are not helpful for most customers experiencing poor performance. I'm happy with my electric car, but I don't think more of the market will adopt them until this issue is directly addressed. "only 20%" dismisses the most critical and insecure experiences with the car.
- xeromal 1y ago
  Yeah, I had a model S for about 4 years and struggled with the bottom 20%. Everything becomes a stressful game of can I make it if the wind is too high. Part of this issue will be solved with more charging stations but the other part is degradation as you said.
  - tonymet 1y ago
    I can relate. I've gotten pretty confident by watching the *consumption tab -- but i don't think most drivers should have to . I think the ones who dismiss this issue drive regular routes with the EV and don't push the boundaries . Then there are the rest of us who actually try to test the limits where you encounter a good deal of unsettling unpredictability . I've pulled supercharger data and found discrepancies between the before and after kwh delivered -- explaining some discrepancies in the charging and forecasts. I don't think anyone else has gone into that level of detail.
- gerdesj 1y ago
  "Electric owners under-value the last 20% of their battery. That is the most important 20%" It's not exactly like an ICE. An ICE (in Europe) will put up a warning light at "I have roughly 50 miles left" you put your max speed at 50mph and find a garage. Job done. I've owned quite a few of them over 30 years. I currently have a MG4 (Saic) Long Range and an elderly Renault Clio. The EV has a demonstrable range of at least 300 miles. UK temperatures. The Clio can do around 600 miles on a full tank. I treat my EV in a similar way to my ICE. When it says it has 50 miles left, I look for petrol or sparks. That works here, now in the UK. It will work in quite a lot of Europe, some of the US, and will be laughable in most of Australia and Canada, most of Africa, ... anyway you get the idea. They - ICE and EV are simply different. You have to learn to work with how they operate. Oh and I pay £1.28 per litre and 7p per KWh (for overnight car charging). The petrol price is low at the moment for here (it hit £2+ when Russia went mental). Quite loose numbers: 600 mi using 50 litres at £1.30 per litre is £65. 300 mi using 70 kWh at £0.07 per kWh is £4.90 say £5. So, less than 20% cost in fuel (£65 vs £10) for an EV (here and now). I'm not too sure the Clio can really manage 600 miles nowadays but it is a good 15 years old! If I have to use a motorway/commercial charger then the cost is around £0.50 to £0.80 per kWh (https://www.gridserve.com/electric-vehicle-charging/our-pricing/ https://www.gridserve.com/electric-vehicle-charging/our-pric...) I don't use them very often The EV will need a new battery in around four years time, or I pass it on. ICEs are around 150 years old. I went to school in Abingdon, where the Morris Garage (MG) operated from in about 1930(?/ish). My MG is a Chinese effort and about as British as I am. EVs are at about the stage that ICEs were when a bloke had to walk in front with a red flag.
brikym 1y ago
I have a cheap 2nd gen Nissan Leaf. It's one of the worst cars for battery degradation since it has no thermal management. I'm in a temperate climate so that helps. After 6 years it's now at about 84% state of health. Not great but it's not catastrophically bad like some anti-EV people will have you believe. I believe the first year experiences the steepest drop in health. Maybe after another 6 years it'll get to 70% and it'll probably get sold to a person who drives shorter distances.
torginus 1y ago
Tbh I'm worrying about everything in my car except for battery degradation. Inverter dying, charging circuit dying, the motor shorting out, some of the DC isolators going bad, charging port crapping out. Even with the battery, my concern isn't with degradation, but that one of the modules decides call it quits and that's all she wrote. Also a lot of EV engineering brings to mind the eternal Douglas Adams quote: 'The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.' All in all, I find the claim that EVs will outlast gasoline vehicles a rather bold and extraordinary claim, and one that won't stand the test of time.
- BLKNSLVR 1y ago
  > Inverter dying, charging circuit dying, the motor shorting out, some of the DC isolators going bad, charging port crapping out. How many of those things are very settled technology though? ie. a lot of years spent iterating and manufacturing out points of failure. The battery itself is the newest technology, such is my understanding (feel free to correct me). They feel like unnecessary worries to me. But then, unnecessary worries seem to be a defining trait of the nowadays.
  - torginus 1y ago
    > How many of those things are very settled technology though? None? We simply don't have the kind of reliability data on EVs going out for 10-20 years that we reasonably expect a well-made ICE car to run for (with regular maintenance and without major component failures). These failures are not theoretical, and have been demonstrated in the wild, and can easily total your vehicle. They might affect you personally if you plan on keeping the vehicle for the long time, or the resale value if you don't. Inverters are known to degrade and fail, solar inverters basically almost always die somewhere between the 10-20 year mark (and those switch far less wattage and don't operate under conditions as harsh), which imo is not acceptable for a car to get totaled in that amount of time. Unfortunately EVs are one of those partisan topics on the internet which have a lot of partisan haters and lovers, which makes reliable info on them almost impossible to find. I personally have both solar at home and drive an EV, so I guess I both into the thing, but I can't say with high confidence that my EV will make it to the 20 year mark with the equal probability a well-made ICE car would.
themafia 1y ago
> I’d say that it’s more likely to be the perception of battery degradation that pushes the value down, not the actual degradation in reality. Why guess? This is data that is almost certainly aggregated back to the manufacturer and could be available as a published report. The fact you don't see this report I think is indicative of the reality. > Pessimism about battery longevity is giving us all cheaper second-hand EVs The seller sets the price. Not the buyer. You should ask why the seller is willing to let the vehicle go for a lower than expected price for a given number of miles. > had lost just 15% of their capacity, on average There are no average batteries. The used vehicle market doesn't work on averages, it generally works on worst cases, particularly in an as-is (no warranty) sale. > in other words, there was no active cooling of the battery As it requires a four way valve. That's a common failure point in EVs. > Many manufacturers provide long warranties for their batteries Do those often persist through private party sales? I'm not trying to be mean, I think EVs are great, but hybrids are still obviously better, and the market is far more complex than this author would like to acknowledge. I dislike articles that start with a conclusion and then spend pages trying to justify it. The data to actually answer this question was available but completely unused here. I did not find this convincing or informative. Think of it this way. There is a segment of the buying market that is hostile to these vehicles by default. Waving your hands with no data to back it up only makes it worse. Anyways..
- foobazgt 1y ago
  > Why guess? Manufacturers DO publish reports. Tesla routinely provides data about the lifetimes of their vehicle batteries, which turn out to greatly exceed their warranties. (This shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Manufacturers just can't afford to have high warranty return rates). The rest of your post is an attempt at hand-waving away what is a real phenomenon. EVs are still new to a lot of people, there's a lot of FUD floating around, and that can affect used vehicle prices. Markets behave irrationally sometimes, and that leads to opportunity. (In this case, getting a value buy on a used EV). > hybrids are still obviously better Hybrids are objectively worse. They have less all-electric (efficient, non-polluting) range, they charge more slowly, they have a more complex drivetrain with more parts subject to repair, etc. They're a better fit for a specific market segment, but that segment is small and rapidly becoming non-existent. You can get cheap EVs nowadays that have more range than my last ICE.
black_puppydog 1y ago
Huh? Battery has never forced me to upgrade. It has invariably been the inability to still use the "new and improved" version of google maps.
- timbit42 1y ago
  I use my phone instead. Having these apps in the car is like buying a smart TV and having the Netflix and YouTube apps fail after a few years due to changes in the services that the apps can't handle and the manufacturer not providing updates any longer.
aidenn0 1y ago
I don't know how it is in Europe, but in the US, a long warranty does not necessarily indicate a belief on the manufacturer that the product will last that long. In many cases warranties are non-transferable (or only partially transferable), so a long warranty could just mean "We think you will sell this before it fails" rather than "We think this will last a long time."
- aianus 1y ago
  I've never seen this on a car, which manufacturers have a non-transferable warranty?
- foobazgt 1y ago
  This isn't a thing, and as a concrete counter-example: https://www.tesla.com/support/vehicle-warranty https://www.tesla.com/support/vehicle-warranty "Yes. Your New Vehicle Limited Warranty will follow your vehicle and be transferred to the new owner when a vehicle ownership transfer is performed through Tesla."
  - aidenn0 1y ago
    Does this imply that everyone who sells a Tesla privately voids the warranty?
    - foobazgt 1y ago
      No, when you privately sell your vehicle, you transfer it through Tesla.
metalman 1y ago
there are electric cars made more than 115 years ago with the original nickle iron batteries that still work, less capacity than lead batteries, but essentialy idestructable and imortal. there is no reason to equate high power density and low weight with a short life span, and in.the case of capacitive electrical energy storage, we are only waiting for higher energy density, ss it is a true solid state battery, though as every substance that can exist will.hold a charge, the number of possible candidates numbers in the trillions, more, but whatever, and there is an absolute inevitability to creating batteries that will serve humanitys transportation needs. thousands and thousands of smart people work on that every day.
whatever1 1y ago
Can we talk about battery safety? Old lithium batteries are ticking time bombs. Swelling, leaking, and ready to ignite at the slightest spark or contact with moisture. As their chemicals break down, one short-circuit can unleash a chain reaction of fire and toxic smoke. Even sitting forgotten in a drawer, they can suddenly swell, rupture, or explode without warning.

135 points by xnx 1y ago

Great post. Minor quibble: the data shows fast DC charging does not have a material impact on battery pack health longevity. TLDR These batteries are going to outlast the vehicle chassis. Full Speed Ahead: EV Study Reveals Impacts of Fast Charging - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37330024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37330024 - August 2023

jayknight 1y ago
>This is a fairly common fear for people considering a new EV: “Won’t the battery need to be replaced after a few years?”. And I think it’s even more prominent in the second-hand market: “Oh, I’d never buy a second-hand battery!”. I will admit that both of these are nagging on me. I fully intend for my next car to be an EV, but if I was buying today, this would be a factor. I drive a 2013 Camry (that I got used) that shows no signs of slowing down. I hope to drive it for at least a few more years. If the car is still reliable when it's time to send a kid in it to college, that's probably when I'll start looking for something new. And you can show me studies all day long, but my irrational brain is just worried that I won't be able to get 15+ years out of an EV because there just aren't that many 15 year old EVs driving around today.
- geoffeg 1y ago
  Don't forget that internal combustions engines lose power and efficiency over their lifetimes. Bearings, piston rings and other components wear, injectors and valves get dirty, surfaces develop varnish, etc. My last ICE car started needing a quart of oil every few months and that was with very good maintenance and not being driven hard. I've been curious about how the degradation compares to EVs. I'm aware it's different kind of wear and that there's different ways to mitigate and repair EVs vs ICE, but they both have their own lifetimes and loss of performance.
  - lpedrosa 1y ago
    I believe the difference between ICE degradation and EV degradation is that the EV one actually affects the car's range. While it is true that your car might consume more oil, and some other component might need replacing, its range, assuming it has been serviced properly, should be similar to what you could get out of it new. I do wonder if the sum of the costs of getting the ICE car back to mint condition will be the same as getting some cells replaced so you get full range again.
    - PaulKeeble 1y ago
      They definitely loose fuel efficiency over time, so they go less far on the same filled fuel tank. Its not as dramatic as a 20% loss but its not nothing either.
    - nicoburns 1y ago
      > While it is true that your car might consume more oil, and some other component might need replacing, its range, assuming it has been serviced properly, Well, until it dies completely (or to the point that servicing it would be more expensive to repair than replace). Then it's range abruptly drops to 0. We won't know for sure until we have more older EVs, but it may well be that EVs last much longer than that at 70-80% range. Which, especially if starting ranges increase, may be a very useful amount of range.
    - neogodless 1y ago
      It's true we can't shake mainstream obsession with range, but I also think most people are a bit hesitant to take their 175,000 mile gasoline cars on long road trips. Not because of range, but because it just might break. So old EVs can be just like old gas cars - used around town rather than for long road trips.
      - sokoloff 1y ago
        We road tripped our 2005 240K+ mile CR-V 750 miles each way every Christmas without a worry. We’d still be road-tripping in that if a negligent Subaru driver hadn’t rear-ended us and pushed us into a Prius ahead as the middle car in a sandwich. The car before that was a 1998 Mercedes diesel with 225K+ miles on it that retired only because of body rust not mechanicals. It helps that I did all the maintenance, so I knew how reliable they were. Cars are insanely reliable and people get irrationally fearful when a car turns 100K and then again at 200K.
- nicoburns 1y ago
  > Just purchased a 2015 Tesla Model S 70D for $9k (USD). It was very worth it. It still holds about 88% of its charge after 175k miles. There are also some positive factors you didn’t mention. The top commenter from the post just purchased a 10 year old EV that they judge to be perfectly good and unlikely to die on them soon. I do think the anxiety about batteries is somewhat justified today, because the capacities are small enough that only have 80% capacity available could be a problem. But once the batteries are larger, I suspect EVs will actually last significantly longer than ICE cars on average.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  I own a 2018 Model S with ~140k miles on it. I have primarily Supercharged it, and have driven it across the continental US several times. It has only lost 8-10% of original range. I get it, lifecycle anxiety is to be expected, but the evidence is fairly robust these batteries will last (and at least in the case of Tesla and my use case, I have an aftermarket person I work with in North Carolina who can provide me refurbished packs if needed). Here is a 2018 Model S with 400k miles on it, although it's original battery was replaced under warranty: https://insideevs.com/news/717654/tesla-model-s-400k-mile-battery/ https://insideevs.com/news/717654/tesla-model-s-400k-mile-ba... (I tried to import a BYD vehicle to the US, with an unfavorable outcome)
  - hadlock 1y ago
    Your car is only 70% of the way through it's nominal lifespan. It seems like battery life is holding up well, but we'll find out a lot more as many of these cars begin their second decade of service, quite often with less rigorous maintenance. I suspect many/most EVs will make it to 300k and 12 years, but the oldest (truly) mass produced Model S are only just now turning 10 years old.
    - toomuchtodo 1y ago
      Certainly, we should keep collecting more data, but the longevity and lifecycle trajectory is obvious. https://spectrum.ieee.org/ev-battery-life https://spectrum.ieee.org/ev-battery-life https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01698-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01698-1 https://old.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1jvwi14/german_automobile_association_adac_statistics_evs/ https://old.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1jvwi14/g... https://www.thejubjubbirds.com/hit-and-run-on-the-energy-transition-highway/the-last-car-youll-ever-own https://www.thejubjubbirds.com/hit-and-run-on-the-energy-tra...
SubiculumCode 1y ago
My other quibble is when the author says the majority of cars are scrapped at 150k-200k..if this excludes wrecked vehicles, I suspect most are sold to used markets, even foreign used markets, not scrapped.
- Animats 1y ago
  Not so much any more.[1] US used vehicle exports are down at least 2/3 since 2008. China is making so many cheap new cars that used US cars are no longer needed. Most scrapped cars in the US are chopped up into little pieces, run through a separator for steel, aluminum, and everything else, and end up at a steel mill to be made into new steel. In Silicon Valley, the chopping and initial separation plant is at the Port of Redwood City. [1] https://www.trade.gov/data-visualization/used-vehicle-trade-data-visualization https://www.trade.gov/data-visualization/used-vehicle-trade-...

kingstnap 1y ago

I think batteries aging as much as they do is a thing we will be able to solve. Dr. Jeff Dahn's talks on YouTube were really striking in how much a bit of chemistry and charging management gets you. https://youtu.be/i31x5JW361k?si=JdjJD_Lzg4qsY84C https://youtu.be/i31x5JW361k?si=JdjJD_Lzg4qsY84C

ZeroGravitas 1y ago
His latest visit to the channel was 12 days ago: https://youtu.be/oc3XgCfQfXs https://youtu.be/oc3XgCfQfXs

colechristensen 1y ago

Having studied battery lifetimes in an engineering context for a significant amount of time I've regularly wondered how much of the slow battery degradation in these car battery packs is "cheating". That is how much of the battery capacity is hidden by the battery management system when the car is new and then slowly doled out as the battery ages to make for the appearance of very slow degradation even though the individual raw cells would be wearing out quite a bit faster? If this were true what you would see is after this excess capacity was exhausted would be battery capacity falling off a cliff eventually, though this data seems to show a couple hundred thousand miles of consistent capacity with no cliff. SSDs do a similar thing for capacity and wear with a sizable proportion of capacity reserved to replace bad blocks as the SSD ages. Whenever I make this comment almost everyone responding is just guessing about how I'm wrong and new chemistries are so much better, etc.

barbegal 1y ago
Yeah as far as I can see all the companies that study EV batteries and provide degradation reports etc. all do so by using the data from the manufacturer. I would trust data about battery degradation a lot more if the data came from an independent data logger, logging voltage and current.
neogodless 1y ago
I'm a bit confused as you're saying this article refutes your hypothesis, right? I'll also offer up an example. The Polestar 2 (prior to 2024) has an advertised 78 kWh battery, but also clearly only 75 kWh available for use. That's about 96% right from the factory. So presumably it's doing what you're saying, but it's also not a secret. It's also a way to prevent regular 100% charges from happening, which have proven to accelerate degradation.
- colechristensen 1y ago
  Their data fit on the extracted (supposedly real) data between 100k and 300k km suggests that you could drive around the planet 5 times while losing only a few percent of total battery capacity and I don't believe that raw cells behave that way regardless of recent improvements.

bangaladore 1y ago

I think we (sorry I) have seen that degradation has not the concern, it's the pack engineering that is an issue by a large margin. Tesla's packs first produced in 2017/18 for the model 3 represented largely the industry's first mass produced packs that will largely fail naturally, not due to pack engineering issues (failed cells, leaks, cooling, etc...). Before that required a much higher pack replacement rate, and other manufacturers have the same issues.

LtWorf 1y ago
[flagged]
- bangaladore 1y ago
  Care to provide constructive feedback/information then rather than a pedantic correction?
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    The comment I responded to was just about one person feelings, trying to involve everyone else in their feelings, it provided no information or way to validate those feelings, hence my response.
  - mft_ 1y ago
    It’s not a pedantic correction, it’s a relevant anecdote to the contrary.
    - bangaladore 1y ago
      I'd disagree for a couple reasons: 1. We in English can mean different things, from you and I to a broader group. Focusing only on that word without addressing the actual point comes off as a language correction. 2. The original comment made several claims about degradation, pack engineering, and industry history. Ignoring those to focus only on wording misses the main discussion. If the responder focused on a given claim that they refute, that's perfectly fine. They didn't.

kulahan 1y ago

Wow, I did not expect anyone to be offering a SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND mile warranty on their batteries. That's some serious confidence. I didn't see anything about it transferring, though. That would be smart on their end - the resale value for electric sports cars at least, is about 50% in the first year, then it levels off hard after that. This would encourage buying new, but not aftermarket. I'll have to look into this. Still, while this removes a primary concern of mine, there's still one major hurdle that cannot be bypassed as far as I can tell (yet): If you have shared parking, there's essentially no way to charge your car. Maybe if it's an outdoor parking lot you can rely on solar power somewhat, assuming you're in a good situation for that? Still, my point is that my parking space isn't actually mine, so I can't modify anything in the garage. Assuming superconductors aren't figured out any time soon, this appears to be an impossible solve, which cuts their consumer market significantly. Also, not exactly the same thing, but they could remove those warranties and instead get some nice replaceable battery cells in there. Let me turn a thing to unlock it, pull out that one cell, and replace it. But maybe I'm a little more wrench-y than their customers want to be?

nicoburns 1y ago
> If you have shared parking, there's essentially no way to charge your car. The neighbourhood I used to live in London (where almost nobody has off-street parking) installed chargers into lamp posts. This BBC article has more details and photos https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67518869 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67518869
stetrain 1y ago
Home charging in shared parking scenarios is difficult. Municipalities can add curbside chargers and in some places this is fairly common. In a private condo or apartment scenario you'd need the owner or association to agree to install them. A second option is more slow chargers installed places your car spends a lot of time parked, like offices or transit stations if you park and ride. A third option is using a fast charger somewhere you go once or twice a week. Like grocery stores, gyms, etc. Costco for example is adding fast chargers to their stores, which should be fast enough for a full charge by the time you actually get in and out of Costco. Replacing cells in a pack can be difficult. You want all the cells in the pack to have roughly the same capacity and voltage curve, so that you can connect them all together and charge them at the same time. GM says that their Ultium batteries are segmented into modules, which each module having its own Battery Management System, and that it supports mixing and matching modules of different degradation and even cell chemistry. But anything that adds complexity to the pack beyond being cells packed in as densely as feasible is going to add costs and reduce maximum energy storage. I think the long term answer here is that there will eventually be a used and remanufactured battery pack market for popular models, just like you can get a used or remanufactured engine today.

cuttothechase 1y ago

>> That’s not bad, given that most cars are scrapped somewhere in the 150,000 to 200,000 miles range. At that point, a Tesla will have more than 80% of its initial capacity, and in some cases, even more. So people will probably give up their car, well, well before the battery gets close to becoming a burden. Can they not see that this is because of correlation and not causation. Why would an EV be given up at 150 - 200K when it has much less moving parts and stressors compared to the traditional ICE based vehicles?

stetrain 1y ago
Some things will still add up. Someone who might be shopping in the price range for a used car with 100,000 miles might also see a car with 200,000 miles that needs brakes (probably for the first time in an EV's life), shocks, bushings, CV joints, A/C service, or possibly corrosion repair/mitigation in some climates, might choose to trade or scrap over spending those repair costs. Also there becomes a crossover point of residual value where a car involved in an accident becomes cheaper to total than to repair, which is probably what takes a lot of cars off the road. That mileage may stretch longer if the important parts of an average EV drivetrain can run without major service for significantly longer than the average ICE drivetrain, which seems like a likely possibility.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
1970-01-01 1y ago
Rust, collision, part availability, and newer safety tech are all reasons to scrap an old EV. I hope manufacturers realize this and make the battery easy for DIY removal, similar to removing the catalytic converter from your rusty and bent ICE vehicle is the big moneymaker.
- WorldMaker 1y ago
  As a low mile driver with a tendency to hold on to cars, it would also probably surprise people how much the average life of plastics are closer to the 15-20 year mark, especially when regularly handled by people. Things like plastic knobs and buttons can break in interesting ways that a lot of people wouldn't expect. We tend to think of plastics as "forever chemicals" because we hear that term a lot, but it's not that plastic is particularly rugged against regular use across time, it's that how it breaks down is awful (see all the discussions of microplastics; it break down and then becomes a part of ecosystems in disturbing ways). (ETA: Also the EV is so much more the "software-defined" car than anything, and the lifecycle of software versus tech debt and long term maintenance is going to be a large issue, even though the cars are mechanically simpler, the software is something making up for that in its complexity.) > I hope manufacturers realize this and make the battery easy for DIY removal This seems to be the case so far. A lot of scrapped cars' batteries seem to be going directly into second use in a second car. A lot of the manufacturers are also prepared for future "power wall" secondary uses of depleted batteries, but so far there has been too much of a market for the used batteries in second cars for used (even depleted) batteries to build a "power wall" market for used batteries. (Tesla's brand of that concept that sounds a lot like the generic term so far has almost exclusively been using new batteries for their products. Nissan's brand that no one has ever heard of, dedicated to used batteries only, has scarcely built or sold anything and is in danger of shutting down as an effort.) The economics of used EV batteries is already a fascinating thing to watch, and something we'll probably see get more interesting rather than less.

bdcravens 1y ago

Most important point is comparing it to loss of efficiency in gas cars. There's a lot more variance there, given the work that a gas engine done and all the ways it can be maintained (and lack thereof), but most numbers I've seen point to around 10-15% after 100k miles.

Hamuko 1y ago
15% efficiency loss doesn't sound that major. My car's currently averaging 7.9 l/100km. It it goes up to 9.0 l/100 km, it means that I need to buy an additional 5.5 litres of petrol over 500 km driven, which is around 10€.
- b112 1y ago
  I won't happen. Gas cars don't lose efficiency like that, so don't concern yourself.
epolanski 1y ago
My 200k+ kilometers diesel Fiat Punto is as efficient as new.
sokoloff 1y ago
I track gas added to all of our cars (because my dad and his dad did). I’ve driven several of them to over 130k miles and one to 242k miles. I’ve never seen even a 5% degradation in mileage from wear. (I did see the ~3% drop in mileage when ethanol was added to the standard gasoline mix. I wonder if someone is confusing that for wear.) If I had a 10% loss in fuel economy, I’d be looking for something wrong and fixing it.
- mlhpdx 1y ago
  I can second this, and do the same math and tracking (someday maybe cars will reliably do this themselves). The same can be done for electrics (power paid for and delivered to the car versus the miles driven).
- b112 1y ago

epolanski 1y ago

> But not many cars get to this driving distance That's just because they don't receive appropriate maintenance. In my family we had plenty of Italian and german cars, we maintained them, most hit 300k+ kilometers. Our 9000$ Lancia Y still worked fine after 350k+ and we only got rid of it because it cannot enter Rome due to emission restrictions.

jacobgorm 1y ago
Italian cars work great in the warm and dry Italian climate, but have historically had trouble with corrosion in colder climates that they were not built for. My dad loved Alfa Romeo’s, but none of them lasted very long in Denmark. In other words YMMV.
- skylurk 1y ago
  https://xkcd.com/3123/ https://xkcd.com/3123/
  - tshaddox 1y ago
    I believe the phrase was originally about "mileage" as in fuel economy (i.e. miles per gallon), but "total mileage" (i.e. odometer reading) is pretty close!
    - skylurk 1y ago
      True! Nice pun, jacobgorm :)
  - retox 1y ago
    Please don't do this, you aren't adding anything to the conversation
- Hamuko 1y ago
  We had an Alfa Romeo and it did not enjoy -20°C. That model has almost completely disappeared from the market after 20 years, with the remaining ones usually being sold as projects or for parts. I think they also had problems with timing belts? Google results are suggesting me that they had to halve the change interval, possibly because of our shitty roads. Volvo belts also last for 10 years in their native Sweden but only 5 years here.

scheisshausDan 1y ago

[dead]

mlhpdx 1y ago

The study data showing average capacity is helpful, but the lower quartile and even more so the bottom 10% is really what people worry about. In the used car market the presence of even a decidedly small number of “lemons” has a significantly detrimental price impact.

loudmax 1y ago

When I bought my Prius in 2010, the longevity of the traction battery was a concern. A month ago, when I finally sold it to a garage, that car had over 190,000 miles on the odometer. I sold it because the transmission needed some repair work. The battery and the engine were still going strong.

jdlshore 1y ago
To be fair, I’m pretty sure the 2010 Prius uses a completely different battery chemistry than modern electric cars. (I think it’s NiCad, but I’m not 100% sure on that.)
- eddyvedder 1y ago
  NiMH
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  NiMH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius_(XW30) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius_(XW30) NiCads suck, you find NiCads in like old AA rechargeables and cheap toothbrushes. I don't know for sure if NiMH last longer than Li-Ion but I've had much the same experience with my Prius - Old as hell and everything but the battery failing
  - ilamont 1y ago
    Same for ours, a 2010 model. It's 15 years old and the battery and electronics work fine, even the GPS system. It's the other stuff that needs fixing: A/C, exhaust, various pumps, etc.
  - frogblast 1y ago
    My prius (2006 model) finally had the traction battery (NiMh) start to loose modules at about 250K miles. It was clearly getting weaker, but drivable at that time. Then Covid hit, and it sat for 2 months without being driven / charge cycled. That pushed it over the edge. That isn't predictive at all of NMC or LFP chemistries though (and I'm not going through multiple charge cycles per drive), but a fun anecdote. It was an entertaining project opening up the battery pack and identifying/replacing the bad modules. In the end, other parts of the car were dying too, and the final straw was California's refusal to allow aftermarket catalytic converter replacements, and the Toyota's price (with no competition) was more than the vehicle was worth. So far my two EVs, both NMC chemistry (Kia and Rivian) are at 80,000 and 30,000 miles respectively, with no noticeable degradation.

gwbas1c 1y ago

I just traded in a 6.5 year old model 3 with 75k miles. Battery was at 87% of capacity. The big problem was cold snaps. It had the older heating system and would lose a lot of charge in the cold. Our 2022 Model Y with the newer heating system doesn't lose nearly as much charge in cold snaps.

ai-christianson 1y ago
does the newer one use a heat pump?
- Kirby64 1y ago
  Yes, they do. All the newer teslas use heat pumps (as well as most other EVs these days).
  - dzhiurgis 1y ago
    A lot of them it’s still optional which says a lot about their small scale.
- xeromal 1y ago
  Yeah, the old one heated the battery through similar tech as heated seats. I think the only problem with the tesla heat pump is that it doesn't function well below 20-30F. I'm not sure if that's all heat pumps.
  - torginus 1y ago
    Well, the problem with the heat pumps in my house, is that near or below freezing temperatures, the outdoor unit has the tendency to freeze over, then either it has to run its resistive heater, or intermittently cut out and blow some cold air inside. It's rather uncomfortable. I'm not sure you can get away with a design that has to sporadically turn itself off, and melt itself down in an EV.
    - 1y ago

copirate 1y ago

How can you tell how much battery capacity is left?

avhon1 1y ago
Any decent battery system measures the current that goes into the battery, and the current that goes out. Off-the-shelf ICs "learn" the battery's initial capacity and its state-of-charge to voltage curve, and thereon can observe degredation below those initial measurements, as well as fairly accurately reporting how much energy is in the battery at any given moment.

shawnz 1y ago

> But the types and structures of electric car and mobile phone batteries are not the same. Car batteries are designed to last far longer. What prevents the same advancements from being applied to phone batteries?

chankstein38 1y ago
Planned Obsolescence.
speedgoose 1y ago
Phones don’t have active cooling, or just proper cooling. Heavy usage and charging will heat up the battery a lot. A warm battery at a high state of charge will deteriorate fast. Also, they aren’t designed to last very long. One manufacturer could reduce the max voltage in the BMS (battery management system), or reduce the charging speed at high states of charges, to significantly increase the lifetime of the battery but they somehow don’t. Though you start to see some phone limiting their charge.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
carelyair 1y ago
Phone batteries are cheaper so less motive to invest in changing the supply chains for a different design.
kingstnap 1y ago
Battery degradation isn't really a function of use as much as its a function of abuse. Phone's are designed to drive their batteries hard. If you are gentle about charging it slowly and keeping it in the 30-80% state of charge region it will last a long time. The worst thing you can do is aggressively charge it to full and drain it till dead constantly. It will last a few hundred cycles before it gets seriously degraded. A lot of people unfortunately (fortunate for smartphone companies) do exactly that (you know that person in your life who's phone is always dead?).
- 1y ago

starwatch 1y ago

> At that point, a Tesla will have more than 80% of its initial capacity, and in some cases, even more. So people will probably give up their car, well, well before the battery gets close to becoming a burden. I looked into the secondhand EV market (in Norway). In doing so I read quite a bit of academic research to figure out the lifetime of an EV. Apparently the 80% capacity is the accepted end of life for an EV battery: "For batteries, 80% of the initial capacity is referred to as the point after which it tends to exhibit an exponential decay of capacity and is considered an unreliable power source after this point for EV application" [1] So, the Tesla the article talks about won't be much good, or at least not for very long. [1]: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3271287 https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3271287

bryanlarsen 1y ago
That's statistical. A small number will start their exponential degrade at 80%, but most won't. Some might get to 60% before they start it. So if you're at 83% at 200,000 miles you don't really know whether you have 50,000 more or you have 200,000 more on the battery. And "exponential degrade" doesn't mean it's particularly fast. It means it's faster to degrade from 80 to 60 than it is from 100 to 80. You're not going to get 500,000 miles out of driving until the battery hits 60% but you might get a substantial fraction. The rest of the car almost certainly doesn't have 200,000 more miles in it, so who cares?
- _carbyau_ 1y ago
  > The rest of the car almost certainly doesn't have 200,000 more miles in it, so who cares? This what I find curious. It used to be cars were largely limited by their main driveline components. Now those components have been simplified. In a lot of the BYD cars it is literally the exact same driveline so for them it is almost commoditised. My part of the world sees no snow or salt. So if the body is fine and the driveline is fine.... Why can't I run a car for a million miles and simply replace coils, struts, hubs, bearings, carpets, seats, the-tiny-electric-motors-that-drive-windows-and-seats-and-mirrors etc? IE where is the electric version of the old landcruiser series?

fencepost 1y ago

For the comparison to phone batteries, it's worth noting that until the last few years few if any phones allowed capping charge below 100% but now iPhones (15 and higher?), many or all Samsungs and unknown others allow capping for battery health. For the Samsung devices, the ability to do this came somewhere around the time they started promising 5 years of OS and/or security updates. I'm pretty sure Tesla early on 'sold' an optional range extension that simply allowed you to charge the batteries further for extra range, with part of that cost presumably covering an anticipated higher battery failure rate. IIRC there were also some times when there were hurricanes coming during which they OTA unlocked that for everyone in the affected regions as well to facilitate evacuations.

tzs 1y ago
> For the comparison to phone batteries, it's worth noting that until the last few years few if any phones allowed capping charge below 100% but now iPhones (15 and higher?), many or all Samsungs and unknown others allow capping for battery health. Apple also added that the the M4 iPad Pro and M2 iPad Air. For those with an iPhone or iPad that does not support this there is a way to hack it. I got this from a comment here on HN many months ago, but don't remember who wrote it. Apple Shortcuts automations can be trigged by battery level. Plug your charger into a smart outlet that can be controlled from Shortcuts, and simply make an automation that runs when the battery level goes above 80% that turns off the outlet. If you want to even more closely match what Apple does on the devices with the 80% limit support built in also make a shortcut that turns on the outlet when the battery level goes below 75%. Some smart plugs work better with Shortcuts than others. For example for an Amazon smart plug by understanding is that what you would have to do is make a routine to turn off the plug in the Alexa app. Then you would have to use a third party service like IFTTT to invoke the Alexa routine from a Shortcut. A TP-Link Tapo plug is a little easier. You still have to set up the plug in the Tapo app, but the Tapo app includes Shortcuts integration so Shortcut actions to turn Tapo devices on and off automatically appear in Shortcuts. That's still not perfect because you need to be logged into the Tapo app. I find that I occasionally get logged out (not sure if it just periodically logs you out or it happens on app updates) and then the Shortcut breaks until you log back in. I've found two ways to deal with that: 1. If it breaks the consequence is that night my iPad charges to 100%. You are supposed to do that occasionally anyway to keep the battery level indicator calibrated, and this is a convenient way to do that. If I wake up and the iPad is at 100%, I go log into the Tapo app. 2. I've got a Shortcut on my desktop to turn on the Tapo plug. I use that to turn it on before charging the iPad. If it doesn't turn on I know it is time to log in again. This way I only get the "fails to turn off" situation if I get logged out between the time I go to bed and the time the iPad passes 80%. I handle the need to occasionally charge to 100% by noticing when my iPhone 15 charges to 100% and then plugging the iPad into a non-smart outlet that night. Best would be to get a plug that works with Shortcuts without needing to use the vendor's app and without needing an internet connection. I thought that would be the Tapo because they can be set up as Matter devices, but after buying it I learned that this requires a Matter contoller and maybe a Thread border router. I have a couple of Amazon Echo devices that may be Matter controllers, but it turns out you need a controller for each platform (Alexa, Google, HomeKit) that you want to control the device from, so my Echos would not help with using a Matter device from Shortcuts. My next step on the Matter path when I get some time is to look at Home Assistant. My understanding is that it can act as a Matter controller, and that the Home Assistant mobile app can has Shortcut integration on iOS. That should let me use the Tapo in Matter mode, and to replace the Tapo app and its annoying login requirement with the Home Assistant app.

tzs 1y ago

> Most manufacturers offer a warranty somewhere in the range of 8 to 10 years, and 100,000 miles. That usually means that if your battery is below 70% health within either 8 years or 100,000 miles, they’ll replace it for you. This disagrees with pretty much every other source I've been able to find. An N year/M mile warranty is good until whichever of N years or M miles you hit first.

rconti 1y ago
The quote you reference doesn't make a distinction either way.
- gerdesj 1y ago
  Well played Sir. My MG4 (Saic) has a five year warranty and rather a lot of small print, that I should probably OCR and pass through Chat for a summary and then read myself. I do know it will last longer than my last car - a Ford Focus with an Eco boost abomination of an engine. The engine oil warning gauge thing decided to only kick in at just above the bottom level on the dipstick. Even so all should have been fine. I even drained and replaced the lot. This was a three year old car. It degraded over about a month and eventually passed away in Bristol. I live in Yeovil, a good hour away. My first car was an elderly Mk1 Ford Fiesta (it was old in 1994). That often managed to run without any oil for some time because it had ended up as a rusty stain with the contents of the radiator on the underside of the bonnet (hood) and on the road.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- tzs 1y ago
  Doesn't it? It says: > That usually means that if your battery is below 70% health within either 8 years or 100,000 miles, they’ll replace it for you. Consider a car with 200k miles at 5 years. 5 years is within 8 years, so I don't see any way of reading "within either 8 years or 100k miles" that would not make that car covered. Similar for a car that is 15 years old with 50k miles. But everything I've seen elsewhere says the warranty applies as long as you are within 8 years and within 100k miles.

tonymet 1y ago

Electric owners under-value the last 20% of their battery. That is the most important 20% If you are running out of "gas" , every lost mile is a mile walking (or being towed). that last 20% of range is the difference between making it to the next charger or being dead on the road. And with electric it's a bigger burden because they can't be refilled with gasoline. As a practical example, my recent charging forecast dropped from 12% to zero % during the drive (this was controlled for consumption, ambient temps, driving speed etc). We finally arrived with 3% on the battery. So that means in a year, we will not be able to make that exact same drive. That is a problem needing addressed. I've also not heard great things with the warranties. It seems people struggle to redeem compensation via warranty. And the qualifying conditions are not helpful for most customers experiencing poor performance. I'm happy with my electric car, but I don't think more of the market will adopt them until this issue is directly addressed. "only 20%" dismisses the most critical and insecure experiences with the car.

xeromal 1y ago
Yeah, I had a model S for about 4 years and struggled with the bottom 20%. Everything becomes a stressful game of can I make it if the wind is too high. Part of this issue will be solved with more charging stations but the other part is degradation as you said.
- tonymet 1y ago
  I can relate. I've gotten pretty confident by watching the *consumption tab -- but i don't think most drivers should have to . I think the ones who dismiss this issue drive regular routes with the EV and don't push the boundaries . Then there are the rest of us who actually try to test the limits where you encounter a good deal of unsettling unpredictability . I've pulled supercharger data and found discrepancies between the before and after kwh delivered -- explaining some discrepancies in the charging and forecasts. I don't think anyone else has gone into that level of detail.
gerdesj 1y ago
"Electric owners under-value the last 20% of their battery. That is the most important 20%" It's not exactly like an ICE. An ICE (in Europe) will put up a warning light at "I have roughly 50 miles left" you put your max speed at 50mph and find a garage. Job done. I've owned quite a few of them over 30 years. I currently have a MG4 (Saic) Long Range and an elderly Renault Clio. The EV has a demonstrable range of at least 300 miles. UK temperatures. The Clio can do around 600 miles on a full tank. I treat my EV in a similar way to my ICE. When it says it has 50 miles left, I look for petrol or sparks. That works here, now in the UK. It will work in quite a lot of Europe, some of the US, and will be laughable in most of Australia and Canada, most of Africa, ... anyway you get the idea. They - ICE and EV are simply different. You have to learn to work with how they operate. Oh and I pay £1.28 per litre and 7p per KWh (for overnight car charging). The petrol price is low at the moment for here (it hit £2+ when Russia went mental). Quite loose numbers: 600 mi using 50 litres at £1.30 per litre is £65. 300 mi using 70 kWh at £0.07 per kWh is £4.90 say £5. So, less than 20% cost in fuel (£65 vs £10) for an EV (here and now). I'm not too sure the Clio can really manage 600 miles nowadays but it is a good 15 years old! If I have to use a motorway/commercial charger then the cost is around £0.50 to £0.80 per kWh (https://www.gridserve.com/electric-vehicle-charging/our-pricing/ https://www.gridserve.com/electric-vehicle-charging/our-pric...) I don't use them very often The EV will need a new battery in around four years time, or I pass it on. ICEs are around 150 years old. I went to school in Abingdon, where the Morris Garage (MG) operated from in about 1930(?/ish). My MG is a Chinese effort and about as British as I am. EVs are at about the stage that ICEs were when a bloke had to walk in front with a red flag.

brikym 1y ago

I have a cheap 2nd gen Nissan Leaf. It's one of the worst cars for battery degradation since it has no thermal management. I'm in a temperate climate so that helps. After 6 years it's now at about 84% state of health. Not great but it's not catastrophically bad like some anti-EV people will have you believe. I believe the first year experiences the steepest drop in health. Maybe after another 6 years it'll get to 70% and it'll probably get sold to a person who drives shorter distances.

torginus 1y ago

Tbh I'm worrying about everything in my car except for battery degradation. Inverter dying, charging circuit dying, the motor shorting out, some of the DC isolators going bad, charging port crapping out. Even with the battery, my concern isn't with degradation, but that one of the modules decides call it quits and that's all she wrote. Also a lot of EV engineering brings to mind the eternal Douglas Adams quote: 'The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.' All in all, I find the claim that EVs will outlast gasoline vehicles a rather bold and extraordinary claim, and one that won't stand the test of time.

BLKNSLVR 1y ago
> Inverter dying, charging circuit dying, the motor shorting out, some of the DC isolators going bad, charging port crapping out. How many of those things are very settled technology though? ie. a lot of years spent iterating and manufacturing out points of failure. The battery itself is the newest technology, such is my understanding (feel free to correct me). They feel like unnecessary worries to me. But then, unnecessary worries seem to be a defining trait of the nowadays.
- torginus 1y ago
  > How many of those things are very settled technology though? None? We simply don't have the kind of reliability data on EVs going out for 10-20 years that we reasonably expect a well-made ICE car to run for (with regular maintenance and without major component failures). These failures are not theoretical, and have been demonstrated in the wild, and can easily total your vehicle. They might affect you personally if you plan on keeping the vehicle for the long time, or the resale value if you don't. Inverters are known to degrade and fail, solar inverters basically almost always die somewhere between the 10-20 year mark (and those switch far less wattage and don't operate under conditions as harsh), which imo is not acceptable for a car to get totaled in that amount of time. Unfortunately EVs are one of those partisan topics on the internet which have a lot of partisan haters and lovers, which makes reliable info on them almost impossible to find. I personally have both solar at home and drive an EV, so I guess I both into the thing, but I can't say with high confidence that my EV will make it to the 20 year mark with the equal probability a well-made ICE car would.

themafia 1y ago

> I’d say that it’s more likely to be the perception of battery degradation that pushes the value down, not the actual degradation in reality. Why guess? This is data that is almost certainly aggregated back to the manufacturer and could be available as a published report. The fact you don't see this report I think is indicative of the reality. > Pessimism about battery longevity is giving us all cheaper second-hand EVs The seller sets the price. Not the buyer. You should ask why the seller is willing to let the vehicle go for a lower than expected price for a given number of miles. > had lost just 15% of their capacity, on average There are no average batteries. The used vehicle market doesn't work on averages, it generally works on worst cases, particularly in an as-is (no warranty) sale. > in other words, there was no active cooling of the battery As it requires a four way valve. That's a common failure point in EVs. > Many manufacturers provide long warranties for their batteries Do those often persist through private party sales? I'm not trying to be mean, I think EVs are great, but hybrids are still obviously better, and the market is far more complex than this author would like to acknowledge. I dislike articles that start with a conclusion and then spend pages trying to justify it. The data to actually answer this question was available but completely unused here. I did not find this convincing or informative. Think of it this way. There is a segment of the buying market that is hostile to these vehicles by default. Waving your hands with no data to back it up only makes it worse. Anyways..

foobazgt 1y ago
> Why guess? Manufacturers DO publish reports. Tesla routinely provides data about the lifetimes of their vehicle batteries, which turn out to greatly exceed their warranties. (This shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Manufacturers just can't afford to have high warranty return rates). The rest of your post is an attempt at hand-waving away what is a real phenomenon. EVs are still new to a lot of people, there's a lot of FUD floating around, and that can affect used vehicle prices. Markets behave irrationally sometimes, and that leads to opportunity. (In this case, getting a value buy on a used EV). > hybrids are still obviously better Hybrids are objectively worse. They have less all-electric (efficient, non-polluting) range, they charge more slowly, they have a more complex drivetrain with more parts subject to repair, etc. They're a better fit for a specific market segment, but that segment is small and rapidly becoming non-existent. You can get cheap EVs nowadays that have more range than my last ICE.

black_puppydog 1y ago

Huh? Battery has never forced me to upgrade. It has invariably been the inability to still use the "new and improved" version of google maps.

timbit42 1y ago
I use my phone instead. Having these apps in the car is like buying a smart TV and having the Netflix and YouTube apps fail after a few years due to changes in the services that the apps can't handle and the manufacturer not providing updates any longer.

aidenn0 1y ago

I don't know how it is in Europe, but in the US, a long warranty does not necessarily indicate a belief on the manufacturer that the product will last that long. In many cases warranties are non-transferable (or only partially transferable), so a long warranty could just mean "We think you will sell this before it fails" rather than "We think this will last a long time."

aianus 1y ago
I've never seen this on a car, which manufacturers have a non-transferable warranty?
foobazgt 1y ago
This isn't a thing, and as a concrete counter-example: https://www.tesla.com/support/vehicle-warranty https://www.tesla.com/support/vehicle-warranty "Yes. Your New Vehicle Limited Warranty will follow your vehicle and be transferred to the new owner when a vehicle ownership transfer is performed through Tesla."
- aidenn0 1y ago
  Does this imply that everyone who sells a Tesla privately voids the warranty?
  - foobazgt 1y ago
    No, when you privately sell your vehicle, you transfer it through Tesla.

metalman 1y ago

there are electric cars made more than 115 years ago with the original nickle iron batteries that still work, less capacity than lead batteries, but essentialy idestructable and imortal. there is no reason to equate high power density and low weight with a short life span, and in.the case of capacitive electrical energy storage, we are only waiting for higher energy density, ss it is a true solid state battery, though as every substance that can exist will.hold a charge, the number of possible candidates numbers in the trillions, more, but whatever, and there is an absolute inevitability to creating batteries that will serve humanitys transportation needs. thousands and thousands of smart people work on that every day.

whatever1 1y ago

Can we talk about battery safety? Old lithium batteries are ticking time bombs. Swelling, leaking, and ready to ignite at the slightest spark or contact with moisture. As their chemicals break down, one short-circuit can unleash a chain reaction of fire and toxic smoke. Even sitting forgotten in a drawer, they can suddenly swell, rupture, or explode without warning.