VW, Rivian, Nissan, BMW lose access to U.S. EV tax credits

Sorry, sometimes you hear and respond to the same arguments a lot and you forget that it might be someone else's first time hearing or thinking about them. (Related to that problem that myths and untruths cover half the country in the time it takes the truth to get its boots on.)

The Leaf battery degradation "problem" is an excuse because it's an over-exaggerated thing that mostly ever affected several early model years of Nissan Leaf and a few early model years of Tesla. (GM did a lot more winter testing early on and made a big deal about battery heat management right out the gate. Other manufacturers picked up that message either from GM marketing or their own winter testing.) Since then Tesla and then Nissan both developed active thermal management for their batteries and any recent model years have them.

Even with all the model years that were affected, in general real-world usage and used market sales suggests that it is not a problem. The vast majority of batteries in cars are still in their "first use" as a car battery. If there is "degradation" in the battery range, used owners rarely notice or care (the range they buy it with is the only range they've known), and "degradation" of the battery is rarely to never the reason given that a car has been listed on the used market in the first place.

As far as I'm aware there's no industry at all for replacing Tesla batteries. I do know that there's a small boutique industry replacing Leaf batteries but most of what I've heard about that are anecdotes such as one about an owner of a 2008 Leaf, that had already done a decade of service as that first owner's family car, getting a new battery not because the old one was "too degraded" but because the new battery was a big enough range boost (above 2008 spec, even) to not just keep a beloved family car in the same family for another decade but also bump it from being less of a "secondary" vehicle for the family and more of the primary vehicle role.

There's no evidence in the used market that anyone needs to replace a battery after 10 years in an EV, but there are heartwarming stories of at least some owners have wanted to a replace a battery after 10 years because they love that car that much.

Outside of the first decade-ish of Nissan Leaf and the first half-decade-ish of Tesla, every other EV has active thermal management and battery "degradation" is nearly nonexistent after 10/15 years and we'll start to see soon what 20 years looks like, but current evidence suggests that batteries really do last the lifetime of a car. The exterior of the car, according to current used market statistics, is more likely to be in a state where the car needs to be scrapped entirely than the battery to appear significantly or noticeably "degraded". As with most statistics there are certainly outliers and you can find plenty of well publicized cases of especially individual Nissan Leafs with noticeably "degraded" batteries, but part of why they get publicized so much is because they are such rare events to the used market and often make interesting stories. (Who those stories sometimes benefit in keeping people afraid of a boogeyman of EV maintenance costs that mostly doesn't exist, I'll leave as an exercise to the reader.) If you dig you can also find fun counter-examples like the "'million mile' Leaf taxi still going strong years later" type things.

So that's one of the largest range maintenance myths.

The above poster also included several common charging myths. Charging an EV is sufficiently different from refueling an ICE that most of the people that think they "need" "10-minute charging times" either don't understand some of the difference or don't care to learn. No one expects a gas tank to be as full as possible every drive and only fill up once a week or once a month. The same is true for an EV, you don't need a full charge every night to be satisfied you have the range you need for that drive/that day/etc. Though home and destination charging is an interesting game changer from that previous status quo, too, because in some cases you can have a full charge every morning you park at home or after you've run a bunch of errands near a charger. Cars spend a lot of time parked and everywhere a car is parked is a (slow) charging opportunity, which is a massive change from gas stations which need to be highly centralized and fast because it is always and forever an inconvenience between two points. Our electric grid is everywhere and massively distributed. Everywhere the light touches can be a place to charge. I've charged my Volt in campgrounds in the middle of nowhere on a random camping plug I found. I've charged it at home in a shared garage where so far I haven't convinced the board to install L2 chargers, but an ordinary wall outlet still charges more than my average daily commute over night. (Or, at least, the last commute I had before remote work became more common.)

Certainly on trips you do have more reason to need a "fast charger" along your route in that "inconvenience between point a and point b" way, and on paper the shift from a "10 minute refuel" to a "20-30 minute charge" sounds like a huge time loss, but refueling is an active process you are supposed to (for safety and legal reasons) watch and be active in every step of that process, whereas charging is a passive process. When was the last time you felt you needed to watch every minute that your phone was plugged in and charging? It can much faster than refueling time to just plug the car in and check that it is locked, at which point you are free to wander to a restroom, buy a meal or snacks, check social media, and other things you are likely to do on a rest stop, all without worrying about your car or needing to watch a (dangerous) refueling process. It's a different experience. It's not necessarily a worse experience, in some ways I think it is quite a bit better. (Teslas and more recent cars [CCS chargers, "NACS" chargers] "know" their own payment information and can pass it to a charger network during charge handshake, there's not even the dance of pulling out a credit card and running through a wordy terminal or annoying "charge network" app, just plug the charger in and the car knows the CC information to send for you and how much you want it to pay for a charge. Support for such chargers isn't yet universal, but the capability is expanding.)

Car charging is just different from refueling and some of it you may not understand until you own an EV. A lot of "range anxiety" turns out to be nonexistent with just a tiny bit of daily EV use and a slow appreciation from learning of home charging opportunities (even at 120v "trickles" of standard US wall outlets!), destination charging opportunities, and the subtle differences of "fast charger" easiness/laziness versus "refueling" active and busy. (Including the overlap of "fast charger" and "destination charging" where you may run errands or see interesting sights or find other productive uses of charging times that gas stations are never quite as convenient to.)

Those are fair requests, thanks for point that out. For the leaf, it's just true that they designed a very poor system for battery reliability in retrospect. All modern EV cars have a battery heating and cooling system that protects the battery and helps protect the mileage. I've had 3 evs now over 10 years, all 3 had battery heating/cooling. My first car from 2012 was driven about 50k miles over 3+ years, no noticeable loss. My second ev is now 8 years old, has about 5 miles of loss over 68k miles (something like 272->268). It's been driven a zillion times between my city and a ski area, about 130 miles round trip. My 3rd one is pretty new so too soon to know.

When you supercharge these cars (with a dcfc), with a high amperage high voltage charger, heating in cold weather or cooling in warm or normal weather really reduces wear and tear on the battery and keeps battery life good. It's just the case that the leaf did have this serious problem - there must have been one or 2 other cars without battery management systems, but the leaf is the only one that seemed to sell in large quantities.