Ours (mid-range 240 mile model 3) has lost less than 20 miles of range after 5 years/36k miles.
How many miles do they have on it? Mileage that short after only 6 years should be covered by warranty. That's not degradation, that's a battery failure.
Though I doubt your friend’s situation would be much different with an ICE. The only way a new battery isn’t covered by the warranty is if he’s already driven 150k miles before 30% degradation hit, at which point ICE cars also see a dramatic drop in resale value.
As to ~10k to replace a battery, high mileage ICE engines end up needing a lot of work over their lifetime. Many 300k mile car see several sets of spark plugs, various belts, plus some big ticket items like transmission, catalytic converter, or cracked head gasket etc. Batteries just condense all that into one big ticket item which slowly degrades and people can budget for.
Yeah, I really don't think you do. That would be an outrageously wild outlier. As others are pointing out, the simple warranty terms promise a 4-5x lower degradation. I won't say it's impossible to break a battery that badly in six years, but if it happened your friend is doing some crazy stuff to their car.
More likely you're misunderstanding or they're spinning. Maybe you heard them talk about wanting to plan road trips with 120 mile legs or something (which is a pretty routine thing -- trips can actually be faster if you charge often at low capacities).
That's my bet. Cold winter, some pack degradation, US highway speeds, and only considering 60% of the capacity (20%-80% for road tripping), 120 miles between supercharging stops is plausible.
https://www.tesla.com/support/vehicle-warranty
> 8 years or 150,000 miles, whichever comes first, with minimum 70% retention of Battery capacity over the warranty period.
So I'm guessing either your friend doesn't read their warranty or they've gone over 150K?
Battery failures happen, but no 6 year old Tesla is at 60% battery degradation without a system failure.
Also, lithium ion batteries are almost entirely recyclable. Once we've mined enough and have a good recycling process in place, this will become more affordable for your average person.
Also, and I'd love if someone could dig up some data on this, the X and S used an older battery type that has since been replaced by a new chemistry and assembly which degrades quite a lot less than the older nickel based batteries.
TLDR: I think battery degradation varies a lot by make/model/year.
With an older gasoline car, at some point you're going to have a transmission repair that will cost ~$2000. The engine will throw an emissions code and you're out $1000. The fuel pump goes bad, you have to replace the timing belt, the lead acid battery dies, actually the battery was fine but your alternator is shot. And when the head gasket fails you decide it's time for another car because even though it's "only" $4000, that's the today price and you know it's only going to be a few months until the muffler rusts through or you have to do the starter motor.
EVs don't have any of that stuff. Replacing the battery is expensive, but replacing the battery could be worth it, because EVs don't have any of that stuff. Once you replace the battery it's much less likely you're going to be facing another large repair bill for a while. Give the car an aluminum frame that can't rust and we could start commonly seeing 40 year old cars on the road.
It's also not impossible that there will be replacement batteries that don't match the original spec. When new the car had a 350 mile range, now the battery is shot and the car is 20 years old and a new battery is $15,000, but a cheaper battery with a different chemistry or fewer cells is only $4000 and it has a 90 mile range. Which is more than the range on some new EVs, and maybe you've only got a 20 mile commute -- or somebody else does who would buy the car.