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.
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.
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.
Also the early Nissan Leafs, pioneers in the mass-market EV space, had batteries with only air cooling and which experienced significant degradation.
More modern EVs with full liquid thermal management and newer cell revisions and chemistries seem to be holding up much better over time.
Some chemistries like LFP have even greater cycle and calendar life in return for a bit less energy density. Ford and GM are both betting big on these for their future entry-level EVs and I think they will end up being a common choice where maximum range isn't the customer's primary concern.
>Also the early Nissan Leafs, pioneers in the mass-market EV space, had batteries with only air cooling and which experienced significant degradation.
Don't forget that beside the chemistry issue in hot environments, the original Leaf only had a 24 kWh battery, so you'd have a lot more cycles than say a 60 kWh or 90 kWh battery. If you assume it is good for 1,000 equivalent charge cycles, and assume you 3.5 miles/kWh, than your 24 kWh battery would be good for 84,000 miles. A 60 kWh pack would be good for 210,000 miles, and a 90 kWh pack is good for 315,000 miles. A new Chevrolet Silverado EV has a 200 kWh pack.
And with a small battery it is more likely that you'd need to charge up to 100% and discharge closer to 0%, which is also harder on the battery.
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.
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?
At my last apartment before I moved into a home where I did have the ability to install a charger, they had 4 EV chargering spots in the parking garage. I believe residents just had to pay the normal residential electricity rate to use them, they were standard commercial level 2 chargers like the kind you see in public parking lots.
All this to say, if the demand is there then shared parking structures will install them. I live in a city with a fairly high percentage of EVs, but it will continue to spread.
We get away with level 1 chargers, and live far from the city. Residential lots could easily get away with one level one charger per spot. (The wattage is < 25% that of one level 2 charger, so you can put in 4x as many with the same backend connection to the grid.)
For city commuters, this would probably be more than good enough.
Yep absolutely, I used a level 1 charger at home for a couple years and it could easily recharge my daily work commute in about 5-8 hours (depending on season). Even now the only upgrade I did was move to a 240V16A charger because I wanted it to be a little quicker after long trips, but most of the time I limit the charge rate to 8A to preserve battery health.
> 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
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.
There is also just the situations where cars are parked on the street and the cabling has to get across the public pavement to charge the car. Even though those people can deploy a charger they can't be blocking the pavement. There is a real concern here where the incentives for the individual to pay to deploy charging capabilities in their car parking bay or front garden can't actually do so because of ownership. It needs solving via legislation, a basic default that people can pay to deploy these systems themselves.
Charging on public infrastructure ought to get there in time but the really big benefit of electric cars comes when it charges at home on cheap electricity and the only time you worry about charging it at all is when you do a long trip and you have to charge it at the half way point for 30 minutes.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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€.
>> 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?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
https://xkcd.com/3123/
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.
Also the early Nissan Leafs, pioneers in the mass-market EV space, had batteries with only air cooling and which experienced significant degradation.
More modern EVs with full liquid thermal management and newer cell revisions and chemistries seem to be holding up much better over time.
Some chemistries like LFP have even greater cycle and calendar life in return for a bit less energy density. Ford and GM are both betting big on these for their future entry-level EVs and I think they will end up being a common choice where maximum range isn't the customer's primary concern.
>Also the early Nissan Leafs, pioneers in the mass-market EV space, had batteries with only air cooling and which experienced significant degradation.
Don't forget that beside the chemistry issue in hot environments, the original Leaf only had a 24 kWh battery, so you'd have a lot more cycles than say a 60 kWh or 90 kWh battery. If you assume it is good for 1,000 equivalent charge cycles, and assume you 3.5 miles/kWh, than your 24 kWh battery would be good for 84,000 miles. A 60 kWh pack would be good for 210,000 miles, and a 90 kWh pack is good for 315,000 miles. A new Chevrolet Silverado EV has a 200 kWh pack.
And with a small battery it is more likely that you'd need to charge up to 100% and discharge closer to 0%, which is also harder on the battery.
I don't know who's "we" but i'm not among them.
Care to provide constructive feedback/information then rather than a pedantic correction?
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
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?
At my last apartment before I moved into a home where I did have the ability to install a charger, they had 4 EV chargering spots in the parking garage. I believe residents just had to pay the normal residential electricity rate to use them, they were standard commercial level 2 chargers like the kind you see in public parking lots.
All this to say, if the demand is there then shared parking structures will install them. I live in a city with a fairly high percentage of EVs, but it will continue to spread.
We get away with level 1 chargers, and live far from the city. Residential lots could easily get away with one level one charger per spot. (The wattage is < 25% that of one level 2 charger, so you can put in 4x as many with the same backend connection to the grid.)
For city commuters, this would probably be more than good enough.
Yep absolutely, I used a level 1 charger at home for a couple years and it could easily recharge my daily work commute in about 5-8 hours (depending on season). Even now the only upgrade I did was move to a 240V16A charger because I wanted it to be a little quicker after long trips, but most of the time I limit the charge rate to 8A to preserve battery health.
> 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
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.
There is also just the situations where cars are parked on the street and the cabling has to get across the public pavement to charge the car. Even though those people can deploy a charger they can't be blocking the pavement. There is a real concern here where the incentives for the individual to pay to deploy charging capabilities in their car parking bay or front garden can't actually do so because of ownership. It needs solving via legislation, a basic default that people can pay to deploy these systems themselves.
Charging on public infrastructure ought to get there in time but the really big benefit of electric cars comes when it charges at home on cheap electricity and the only time you worry about charging it at all is when you do a long trip and you have to charge it at the half way point for 30 minutes.
> Still, my point is that my parking space isn't actually mine, so I can't modify anything in the garage.
Presumably over time shared parking areas will get upgraded with charging infrastructure to keep attracting tenants.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
My 200k+ kilometers diesel Fiat Punto is as efficient as new.
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€.
>> 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?
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.
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.
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 - August 2023
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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-ba...
(I tried to import a BYD vehicle to the US, with an unfavorable outcome)
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.
> 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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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.