EV Batteries Are Defying Expectations After Miles

(wsj.com)

24 points | by apparent 2 hours ago ago

14 comments

  • PaulKeeble an hour ago

    No manufacturer is testing the batteries life by just charging and discharging them daily for a decade before releasing them. Instead they are using artificial acceleration techniques like getting the battery hot while charging/discharging continuously to simulate a longer lifetime. They can't realistically do anything else to estimate it. But it turns out heat is the big enemy for li-ion batteries and if you can keep them on the cooler side of their range they will last a lot longer.

  • NitpickLawyer an hour ago

    Isn't this old news? I remember reading about 7yo teslas used exclusively in cold climates (Norway, Finland, etc) and they found the same thing: batteries held on much better than even the manufacturer expected. And those were often 1st gen cars, which you could expect to have teething issues.

    It was at the time one of the main reasons the 2nd hand markets in those countries were pretty healthy and saw a lot of movement of used cars.

  • whatever1 40 minutes ago

    Wasn’t the same concern with the Toyota Prius when it was first released? Only for all the doubters to be proven wrong by the taxi drivers who kept beating Priuses for decades.

    In any case battery failure seems rare but it still is catastrophic and nobody can afford replacement. Hence companies should just provide some sort of warranty / insurance product for the few unlucky folks. Seems like an ideal candidate.

  • cgyvbunji an hour ago

    They still die by calendar age based degradation. High miles low years isn't interesting. We know that works well. They don't like talking about the calendar age degradation. Every article like this leaves that part out. It's annoying. Many articles have been written like this. Many more will be written yet. I guess there are still people out there who don't know that EVs are ideal for drivers who accumulate high miles per year. Personally I don't think batteries are going to get interesting until solid state batteries. The problem is the electrolyte.

    • bulbar an hour ago

      Do you have more information regarding age based degradation? I haven't looked too deeply into the topic and I am not sure if the argument had been about pure age based degradation or about "after X years because a person will have driven Y kilometers since then".

    • JumpCrisscross an hour ago

      > They still die by calendar age based degradation

      Source?

      • y1n0 44 minutes ago
      • stavros 20 minutes ago

        Lithium batteries age even just sitting on the shelf. I fly RC planes and we store our batteries at 3.8V to lengthen their life, but they still deteriorate even when not used. Like anything else, I guess.

        • defrost 17 minutes ago

          The article specifically talks about how this has changed with the evolution of chemistry in Li based car batteries.

          I suspect the RC plane batteries you've been using for five years are not the same chemically as the EV car batteries in use in the UK for five years.

    • small_model an hour ago

      False

      "A 2015 Model S with over 265,000 miles on the original battery (85% capacity remaining)"

      • foxglacier 8 minutes ago

        That's 25000 miles per year, which is high. So the opposite of false.

        • defrost 3 minutes ago

          The comment above is (I would guess) about the eleven years of battery usage rather than the mileage.

          The implication being that runs counter to the claim of "calendar age degradation".

    • borski an hour ago

      This is just untrue.