5 ms·

The warranty doesn’t suggest the battery will be at 70.00001% on the first day of year 9. It says if it goes below 70% it will get replaced. That 8 year old T

by mulmen 1y ago

The warranty doesn’t suggest the battery will be at 70.00001% on the first day of year 9. It says if it goes below 70% it will get replaced. That 8 year old Toyota you bought came with a 6 year/60k mile warranty. If you are comfortable driving that to 2.5x the initial warranty then a used Tesla should be good to 250k and 20 years.

BeetleB 1y ago
> The warranty doesn’t suggest the battery will be at 70.00001% on the first day of year 9. It says if it goes below 70% it will get replaced. The point is that they're not confident enough to say it won't be in that range. Put another way, why don't they just make the warranty 80% instead of 70%? If Tesla's not confident in it, I definitely am not. > That 8 year old Toyota you bought came with a 6 year/60k mile warranty. If you are comfortable driving that to 2.5x the initial warranty then a used Tesla should be good to 250k and 20 years. We hope so, but we don't know, which is the point. Toyota has a track record. Tesla hasn't been around long enough to have a track record. That aside, the real point is that ICE cars don't have any particular component that costs that much to replace. How much will a new EV battery cost me? Sure, on occasion you may have to rehaul your whole engine, but that's really rare. I've only known one Toyota owner who had to do that, and it cost (in today's dollars), about $6K. When I buy an 8 year old car, I don't expect perfection. I know things will break - soon. I buy it with the confidence that repairs will not be too expensive, and even after all the repairs I'll still save a ton of money. The other blocker is the private party market. So far I've never bought a car from a dealer. I always go private party. The standard procedure with that is you take the car to a trusted mechanic who will examine it and inform you of any potential problems. With electric vehicles, those mechanics can't do much. I've asked them. They can look at a few things like the brakes, but stuff related to the engine is beyond their ability. So whereas I may be comfortable spending a lot of money buying an ICE car from private party, I'm not for EVs.
- mulmen 1y ago
  Why doesn’t Toyota make their powertrain warranty 80k miles? Or 200k? The warranty is there to cover failures. If a pack has a defect it will drop under 70%. If it doesn’t then it will continue working beyond the warranty term. You’re assuming linear decay and that Tesla has fit the warranty coverage tightly to that line. It seems more likely to me that Teslas warranty is designed to address unexpected exponential decay. This is consistent with ICE powertrain warranties.
  - BeetleB 1y ago
    You're not wrong, but none of this answers the question I have: What will the capacity be at 15 years? My current car is 22 years old. I paid a whopping $3.5K for it, and have not spent much in repairs. My prior car - used it till it was 17 years old. Would have used it longer but someone totaled it. I paid (in today's dollars), about $12K for it. Spent very little in repairs. The car before that - used it till it was 16 years old. I know the person who bought it from me and he used it for another 3-4 years. I paid $5.5K for it (today's dollars). Spent very little on repairs. So anyone who's buying a 6-8 year old EV needs the following answers: 1. How long will the battery be good for? 2. How much will replacing it cost? 3. Will the savings on gas more than compensate?
    - mulmen 1y ago
      We have a pretty good idea how EV packs decay. This isn’t a new technology. Google searches suggest 1-2% decay per year. So a 15 year old car would have 70-85% of original range. For pack replacements I don’t know, however it seems unlikely you’d really need to. The battery will almost certainly outlast the car. Range will be degraded but I don’t see a lot of 2005 vehicles doing cross country trips either. Even a degraded EV will be useful in town. Many people only drive a few tens of miles a day. The cost per mile is a simple calculation. It’s a function of your local electricity prices.
      - BeetleB 1y ago
        "In our 2023 reliability survey, 17 percent of 2013 Tesla Model S owners told us their cars needed battery pack replacements at a cost of $15,000 each." This is 11-12 years in. Granted, perhaps batteries were just crappier back then, but 17% is a scary high number for me. Also: "This is in line with data from Recurrent, a firm that analyzes and measures EV battery performance, which found that 13 percent of EVs older than 2015 needed battery replacements. By comparison, only 1 percent of EVs newer than 2016 needed new batteries. " The source of some of the data. What happened with 2020 vehicles?! https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/how-long-do-ev-batteries-last https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/how-long-do-ev-batter...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
NDizzle 1y ago
Batteries don't work like that and you know they don't.

by mulmen 1y ago

BeetleB 1y ago

> The warranty doesn’t suggest the battery will be at 70.00001% on the first day of year 9. It says if it goes below 70% it will get replaced. The point is that they're not confident enough to say it won't be in that range. Put another way, why don't they just make the warranty 80% instead of 70%? If Tesla's not confident in it, I definitely am not. > That 8 year old Toyota you bought came with a 6 year/60k mile warranty. If you are comfortable driving that to 2.5x the initial warranty then a used Tesla should be good to 250k and 20 years. We hope so, but we don't know, which is the point. Toyota has a track record. Tesla hasn't been around long enough to have a track record. That aside, the real point is that ICE cars don't have any particular component that costs that much to replace. How much will a new EV battery cost me? Sure, on occasion you may have to rehaul your whole engine, but that's really rare. I've only known one Toyota owner who had to do that, and it cost (in today's dollars), about $6K. When I buy an 8 year old car, I don't expect perfection. I know things will break - soon. I buy it with the confidence that repairs will not be too expensive, and even after all the repairs I'll still save a ton of money. The other blocker is the private party market. So far I've never bought a car from a dealer. I always go private party. The standard procedure with that is you take the car to a trusted mechanic who will examine it and inform you of any potential problems. With electric vehicles, those mechanics can't do much. I've asked them. They can look at a few things like the brakes, but stuff related to the engine is beyond their ability. So whereas I may be comfortable spending a lot of money buying an ICE car from private party, I'm not for EVs.

mulmen 1y ago
Why doesn’t Toyota make their powertrain warranty 80k miles? Or 200k? The warranty is there to cover failures. If a pack has a defect it will drop under 70%. If it doesn’t then it will continue working beyond the warranty term. You’re assuming linear decay and that Tesla has fit the warranty coverage tightly to that line. It seems more likely to me that Teslas warranty is designed to address unexpected exponential decay. This is consistent with ICE powertrain warranties.
- BeetleB 1y ago
  You're not wrong, but none of this answers the question I have: What will the capacity be at 15 years? My current car is 22 years old. I paid a whopping $3.5K for it, and have not spent much in repairs. My prior car - used it till it was 17 years old. Would have used it longer but someone totaled it. I paid (in today's dollars), about $12K for it. Spent very little in repairs. The car before that - used it till it was 16 years old. I know the person who bought it from me and he used it for another 3-4 years. I paid $5.5K for it (today's dollars). Spent very little on repairs. So anyone who's buying a 6-8 year old EV needs the following answers: 1. How long will the battery be good for? 2. How much will replacing it cost? 3. Will the savings on gas more than compensate?
  - mulmen 1y ago
    We have a pretty good idea how EV packs decay. This isn’t a new technology. Google searches suggest 1-2% decay per year. So a 15 year old car would have 70-85% of original range. For pack replacements I don’t know, however it seems unlikely you’d really need to. The battery will almost certainly outlast the car. Range will be degraded but I don’t see a lot of 2005 vehicles doing cross country trips either. Even a degraded EV will be useful in town. Many people only drive a few tens of miles a day. The cost per mile is a simple calculation. It’s a function of your local electricity prices.
    - BeetleB 1y ago
      "In our 2023 reliability survey, 17 percent of 2013 Tesla Model S owners told us their cars needed battery pack replacements at a cost of $15,000 each." This is 11-12 years in. Granted, perhaps batteries were just crappier back then, but 17% is a scary high number for me. Also: "This is in line with data from Recurrent, a firm that analyzes and measures EV battery performance, which found that 13 percent of EVs older than 2015 needed battery replacements. By comparison, only 1 percent of EVs newer than 2016 needed new batteries. " The source of some of the data. What happened with 2020 vehicles?! https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/how-long-do-ev-batteries-last https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/how-long-do-ev-batter...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

NDizzle 1y ago

Batteries don't work like that and you know they don't.