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Comment by aftbit | Hacker News Reader

This is a major problem that will plague EVs during the second half of their lifecycle. They are cheaper to maintain up until they need a battery replacement, then they are essentially e-waste. Will that happen before or after their bodies rust into dust?

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I bought a used EV back in 2016 (2013 Leaf, certified preowned from dealer, just off 3 year lease), and negotiated 25% off asking price, coming in at $9k.

I have had $0 in maintenance costs, the battery health meter (and approx range) is still exactly where it was when I bought it, despite tripling the miles. I drive it every day for in city driving.

Meanwhile my Jeep of the same era required a new crate motor be installed after a cooling failure, and I’m pretty sure the transmission will need replacing in the next 5 years. The repair costs on this vehicle have been well over $10k. We ended up giving it to my sister in law after fixing it up, then bought a Subaru (which the assisted cruise control on is basically highway self driving, so good for long trips!).

A lot of ICE cars end up as junk too. The EV is actually more promising to me BECAUSE of the battery swap. I can put a battery in my Leaf from a newer vehicle and increase range to a couple hundred miles (I’ll do this eventually, maybe in another 10 years). This increases the longevity of the vehicle (it’s a great car aside from range).

Honestly, the Leaf was the best car purchase I’ve ever made (I’ve owned 7 in my life, all for > 10 years, aside from the latest car and another which was stolen). I’d highly recommend people buy used EVs (but I would do a certified preowned vehicle from the dealer again, you want to know that it doesn’t have said costly damage to the vehicle, but that’s true of ICE cars that require major work too).

PS: we use the EV for city driving (easily 90% of our car use) and the ICE car to go long distances (visit relatives, camping, road trips), and only leaves the garage 2-5 times a month (but packs on the miles!).

“I can put a battery in my Leaf from a newer vehicle … and increase range to a couple hundred miles“

I think you’ll find putting a battery from a newer LEAF generation is not going to be trivial or cheap. Cars invented planned obsolescence, computers have nothing on them, so there’s likely to be non-trivial differences between batteries.

Wrong in this case. It's a straightforward common swap on these, at most needing some brackets and an intermediary on the can bus, and stronger rear springs depending on the exact swap.

The Leaf is very well know online for this being a very easy direct swap.

There is more than one company out there shucking old Insights and Leafs for their battery modules for stationary storage applications, check with them wrt resale value if they're procuring in your area before DIYing or trading the vehicle in to a traditional auto market maker.

If you can afford it, I recommend folks buy new EVs and leave old EVs to be repurposed for stationary storage (as current grid demand is voracious for storage, which will drive fossil generation out of the electrical mix faster). If you can't afford a new EV, certainly, a used EV is fine if you can live with the reduced range and fast charge challenges.

Wow nice deal! I wish I could keep a car for 10 years. I have had some cars that are pretty old, like my 2001 Ranger, but either major mechanical failure or crashes have taken them all from me within less than a decade of ownership.

The equivalent car to your 2013 leaf today would be from 2019 or 2020. I wonder if I could find one of those for under $10k. That would be pretty awesome. The truck could get demoted to living outside and I would save some cash and CO2 when I drive around town.

Tesla will happily replace the batteries in your car for around $10,000. However generally they retain 80-90% of their capacity after over 200,000 miles and 15 years of driving. Lithium ion batteries can be reconditioned and remanufactured. ICE cars have been rusting in junkyards since the outset at much fewer miles and more expensive overhauls of their major systems for generations. The ewaste battery meme stuff is just folks hanging onto the age of fire unreasonably. The age of Maxwell is upon us.

N.b., Other car makers, YMMV. But it’s not intrinsic to the technology. If there are issues like this, it’s brand dependent. Caveat emptor.

>They are cheaper to maintain up until they need a battery replacement, then they are essentially e-waste. Will that happen before or after their bodies rust into dust?

Modern EV lithium batteries last a very long time. Tesla numbers are showing >80% capacity remaining on a 10 year old car. Yes there will be people who want to swap out at that point to restore their range. But the reality is that the degradation is acceptable for most people and still leaves you with plenty of usable range.

Tesla actually has reasonable pricing for the battery replacement.

Part of the price you pay for the car is what we in Norway called "pant", so when you replace the battery this price is subtracted since it's the price tesla buys the old battery back for.

For my X it would cost $10000 to replace the battery, however after 5 years and 100.000 km it's still at 95% of the original capacity..

The problem is that shops are basically replacing the whole engine because a head gasket swap is too hard for them.

It’s perfectly possible to swap faulty cells in an EV battery, but it requires specific skills and tools. Most shops don’t bother. It’s easier to swap the whole battery.

Swapping the whole thing is reasonable if you get the full value of the "dud" battery.

There's specific factories that buy and refurb these, only replacing specific cells and/or modules and then selling them on again as replacement parts.

Even the totally mashed parts (from a crash perhaps) have some residual value as scrap.

Fairly certain similar has happened when I've mailed off Xboxes for warranty repairs. I've got someone else's refurbed unit sent to me and mine then enters the refurb process before being returned to someone else.

As long as you can get the battery working, even with the missing cells, it's gonna be multiple tens of kilowatts of capacity.

And if you can sell the client a full battery replacement for full price while still keeping the old one, you're making $$$

An NMC battery that gets 200 miles to a charge will last 1,000 cycles x 200 miles = 200,000 miles. An LFP battery will get 3x that.

You’ll probably get batteries that outlast the bodies. The batteries themselves are recyclable too.

Most of the time the engine on a modern car out lasts the body. At least an snowy climates

Sure, but I’m not sure how common it is to transplant an engine into another car - maybe we will do that with batteries?

It used to be common. In the 1950s engines didn't last as long so you would do such a thing. Now when I hear of it I assume a mechanic ripped someone off. Though race cars do abuse engines enough that a swap is worth it for them.

If only we could invent swappable batteries.

You can swap the batteries in some cars, but it’s still something to have a professional do.

For leaf info: https://github.com/dalathegreat/Nissan-LEAF-Battery-Upgrade

Nio, a Chinese EV manufacturer, allows batteries swap instead of charging.

They have swapping stations where you just drive the car in and the battery is swapped through an automated process in under 5 minutes, then you drive off with a full charge.

Edit: here it is https://youtu.be/1kZgG58zz8U?si=RVdtpw7uthJFZqVv

Wait until that reachs F1 and it will be 5 seconds.

The problem will be battery thieves.

You mean Formula E?

In other words, wait until E becomes 1.

https://insideevs.com/news/664267/nio-drivers-prefer-ev-batt...

Recent Tom Scott video about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w

Nio does that. Chinese are killing it with their evs.

Modern gasoline cars are remarkably well designed to have everything fall apart at once. They come with an 5 year / 100,000 mile warranty and fall apart at 15 years / 200,000 miles. This not-a-coincidence is a combination of both increasing the reliability of unreliable power train components over the decades and cost cutting in others.

But an electric motor can easily last 1,000,000 miles, and we've got some battery technologies (LFP) that can also get close to that. The rest of the car could be engineered to go that far, but isn't because there has been no demand for it.

But taxis, Ubers and self-driving cars do, so I wonder if we'll see cars with a 250,000 mile / 5 year warranty. What kind of premium would the market for such a car bear?

I drive a mercedes diesel van whose engine is likely to last 1M miles. The problem is that engineering the rest of a vehicle to last even half that is incredibly challenging. Suspension systems, steering, braking, even just body panel fit over 500k miles are all subject to incredible demands. At this point, I feel that the 1M target is a bit silly. Given technological change (often but not always progress), a 20 year target seems like a sensible compromise.

Class 8 trucks regularly do > 1 million miles and Toyota taxis regularly do > 500,000 miles.

It's certainly not easy, but it is possible.

Yeah, it is clearly possible. But trucks have the benefit of generally accumulating huge amounts of highway miles, which is substantially easier on the entire vehicle than family hauling and commuting. Those taxis are amazing, but I wonder if that's the right model given technological change over their lifetimes.

Also, particularly for trucks, the economics of a vehicle used to make money look a bit different than one that is purely for transportation utility.

When I lived in the Bay Area I used to use a driving service to go to the airport and the owner had an early Model S. We had several conversations about how many hundreds of thousands of miles he already had on it and how well it was holding up. He said that he wouldn’t be surprised if it lasted a million miles. Obviously the battery was degrading over time but the powertrain was so much more reliable than an ICE.

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