Modern EV Batteries Rarely Fail: Study
insideevs.com
insideevs.com
EVs generally will require less maintenance as they are substantially simpler vehicles with less moving parts.
This may be a rating you heard somewhere but the truth with practical real-world use is… debatable.
If you run these in a lab, ok, maybe, according to someone trying to sell you batteries.
If you run your vehicle at a spread of -20F to 120F, absolutely not.
I can promise you that the vehicles we are working on go past 2032 and they’re all still ICE.
These EVa are just not replacements for ICE. They make great supplements and town cars. It’s a marketing failure, and I’m not sure the pie in the sky “your car will fail before your battery” claim is helpful.
I’m pretty sure the only people that would jump on that are EV owners, which I am, and don’t.
My wife drives the EV most days. I cannot count the number of times I have been running late and had to stop to fill my gas guzzler up. It is freeway most of the way to work ( no gas stations ) and I have risked it more than once. The EV “tank” is full every morning so it never puts her through that.
In practice, I have way more range anxiety in my ICE vehicle than my wife does in her EV.
Supplements and town cars? If I could afford a new vehicle, my ICE vehicle would be the supplement.
Charging up at a station is still a bigger chore but on a different relaxed way
It seems to me that desire for capacity above 250-300 miles is mostly just accommodation for the lack of availability and slowness of chargers.
Time in/on?
Almost all of them including Ferrari.
I've been using EV exclusively since 2022, including long road trips. EV can't totally replace ICE, but nor can ICE totally replace EV. I can't run an ICE car in a closed environment without poisoning myself to death for instance. But exact replication was never the point.
In addition to great supplements and town cars, they're also great cars. If I can help it, I'll never own another ICE vehicle again.
I’d call that a pretty good demonstration that EVs are a real replacement for ICE at this point for a range of conditions (one exception I will grant you for now is if you have a heavy trailer you intend to drive long distance with)
There’s also not EV models for all niches, mainly because car companies haven’t had time to design them.
Yes, the economics in other countries is not as good and the infrastructure isn’t as good. But that has nothing to do with the capabilities of the vehicle itself.
The claim that the battery of a modern battery could outlast the vehicle and be on the order of 500k miles doesn’t seem at all unreasonable to me. Especially for LiFePo. Our old 2015 Kia Soul EV looks like it will reach about 150k miles on its original battery. But most vehicles now have 2-4 times bigger battery, with better chemistry and much better thermal management. Bigger batteries means it’s much less likely that it will be driven down to below 10%. More likely that the owner will cap charging to 80% to reduce battery degradation and much less use of fast charging. So we’re talking about several layers of non-linear reductions in battery degradation.
We fast charged the old Kia all the time. Our Ioniq 5 we haven’t needed to fast charge a single time.
I made a projection of EV sales in Norway back in 2017, assuming that the growth will follow a logistics curve (S-curve) that most technology transition follows. The sales have tracked that projection almost perfectly ever since.
I crunched the numbers for world EV sales. With a conservative assumption that puts several of the preceding years above the projection curve. This actually gives very similar parameters for the curve as for Norway, but with a time offset of about 7 years. The projection predicts that EV sales will hit 85% market share by 2030.
You need the asterisk there and an explanation that says "for my use".
There are clear and gaping holes in the EV line, mostly for American use-cases where people "need" a F250 crew cab as a commuter and their electric grid will crap out if you plug in too many Christmas lights. And America also has an abundance of people who regularly (As in daily or weekly) commute/travel distances that would take one across 1-3 countries in Europe.
On this side of the big wet bit, there are far fewer holes, but they do exist. There's an abundance of compacts, sedans and normal-sized SUVs - all of which are perfectly enough for day to day use.
Mine does 200-250km comfortably during the warmer months and 150km-ish when it's -20C. The last time I plugged in to a charger other than the one at my house or my parent's was last September when we did a longer road trip as a family and I wasn't sure about the destination hotel's charging situation.
If I need to haul insane loads, I can hire a massive van for 10€/hour. Or I can just pay to have stuff delivered.
I’m telling you no matter how you want to justify the vehicle, or the range anxiety, or the sitting at charging stations for hours - they are not replacements for ICE vehicles. They’re excellent town cars though.
It’s been an assumption trap on both sides. The current gen of EV marketing will go down in history books.
You can drive that far at -40C with pretty much even the most beat down first gen Nissan Leaf with an original battery.
And if you can charge at home (like you should if you own an EV), the battery will be at 100% every single morning. So you'll spend around 15 seconds plugging the car in the charger when you come home and 7.8 seconds taking it off the charger.
And with all the money you save on gas by using electricity for commuting, you can buy a huge Mad Max style ICE with 500 gallon tanks you can use to drive coast to coast without stopping to refuel once :D
Pay attention to how often a single pump is out of service at a gas station. It's quite frequent. You just don't care because there are other pumps you can use.
OTOH, most non Tesla charging stations are a single charger with multiple heads. Redundancy is a big reason for the perceived reliability of gas stations and Tesla superchargers.
When I do get vibrations, it’s almost always from unbalanced wheels/tires.
The problem is that (1) this is simplistic, and doesn't take into account temperature fluctuations, ac usage, etc, and (2) battery datasheets are essentially sales brochures, and often stretch the truth. (For instance, it's rare to see a battery that can actually hit the rated capacity under realistic conditions).
I keep hearing this, but then keep seeing stories about huge repair bills and wait times for repairs on EVs, and threats of insurance rates for EVs to increase because of the high cost to repair.
A large percentage of the repair work on fossil fuel cars is body work, brakes, suspension, etc. All components that EVs have. I’m skeptical that this work will be cheaper on EVs than any other car.
Every part that can be manufactured is put into a new car and sold, there is very little surplus of parts. And what little is sold, is sold at a premium. Add a nonexistent 3rd party market to that and you've got a supply issue.
For my ICE car I could just go buy a generic part if I didn't care about the quality - and in some cases a cheaper part made for another brand (Skoda) that was 1:1 with the more expensive part (VW branded).
What doesn't break is the electric engine, there is one moving part, the shaft and excluding some outliers the engine will outlast the body of the vehicle many times over. Same with batteries, barring manufacturing issues or damage, the wear is very predictable and gradual.
This is what gives the (illusion of) reliability to EVs. There are very few mechanical parts that can just suddenly break and leave you stranded. Software and electronics though... =)
Battery tech is what makes our present and future tech economy possible [2].
[1] I don't baby my EV - always charge to 100%, use fast chargers, don't worry about getting it to 10% or lower. It has lost maybe 5% of it's rated capacity.
[2] with apologies to CEO Morgan from SMAC.
I've seen >>10 year old laptops where the battery is still good enough to go from charger to charger. Just go to ebay and check out 2009 MacBooks. That's ~15 years now.
I don't think this is unrealistic if you can live with the heavier degradation.
Don’t forget that there are other parts of a car that degrades as well with time. Eventually most well used cars will have an engine or powertrain issue if they even make it to 15 years to use without being totaled in an accident or simply sold second hand or misused.
For 2 reasons, primarily. First, Toyota chose nickel-cadmium batteries because of their higher charge-cycle life, at the cost of a much lower energy density (about half that of li-ion). Secondly, they designed their system so that the discharge rate and the discharge level of their battery pack stayed low, thereby maximizing the lifetime of their battery pack, at the cost, once more, of extra weight.
So those two aspects combined mean that you can expect a much longer real-life usage of your battery pack before reduced performance becomes an issue.
I fully agree that a battery pack replacement after 15 years could be considered reasonable (as long as the build quality of the rest of the car warrants it, which is not a given nowadays). But if the mean-time between replacement is around 5 years, then it becomes unreasonable.
It depends on how much it is driven of course. The mileage is probably a bit below average on that one. I have a short commute to work. We did some road trips in it though.
You gotta take into account that old EVs with small batteries will probably often be used as a second car, and so used less often. That’s the case for us since we got a newer bigger car as our family grew. We don’t take the Kia on road trips anymore and my wife takes the bus to work.
In the US there is a federal mandated warranty of 100k miles. But this leaves the used market in limbo (one of the reasons that EVs have horrible residual value).
If the failure rates are indeed so low then where are the insurance products for extended battery warranties? If the numbers are correct it would be a ludicrous business.
A more interesting question is whether the prices reflect this science. Insurance are usually pretty good at this as it's their job, but in small markets they might play it safe.
The degradation of charge capacity though is almost always completely dependent on usage patterns though, if you trickle-charge instead of fast-charge, don't do a lot of full cycles (100% to empty) and keep them in reasonable temperatures they will lose very little charge capacity. BMS systems in cars have been getting better and regulating the temperature of the batteries even when the car is off though.
Unfortunately the used market doesn't have a reasonable way to measure charge capacity, the only way out is for regulations to force disclosure of current charge capacity and total power cycled through the battery and tools to get that information out. Those two metrics would provide similar information compared to mileage for a gas-powered car.
Also if I had the capital, space and know-how I would be buying every single dirty-cheap used EV I could get my hands on and store the batteries. Soon those batteries are going to be a gold mine for recycling.
Recycling li-ion batteries is like aluminium recycling, very energy intensive but you get almost all the raw materials back and recycled aluminium is cheaper than newly mined aluminium. Soon you will see people shipping those used batteries to places with cheap energy for recycling (like Iceland for aluminium recycling). The process is more complicated than aluminium and there aren't that many spent batteries around which is why this is not a big thing yet.
It’s expensive, perhaps not worth it to most. But it’s a very, very niche model. And many of them still work just fine on their original battery. The market for battery replacement is tiny. No economies of scale.
Imagine 15-30 year down the line when there are millions of Teslas, Ioniqs, etc in the market for a replacement battery, and we have a huge battery recycling industry willing to pay a decent sum for an old car battery. And significantly reduced costs for producing new cells.
Getting the battery replaced will be just like getting a new transmission for an ICE vehicle. Big investment. Painful on your wallet. But it’ll be worth it. Especially considering that the motor and inverter can probably last another 30 years without any issues.
I’m mostly curious what happens when an EV has been neglected or left un running for long durations.
You have a warranty issue. Get it fixed before it's too late.
It's really up to the manufacturer how active they want the system to be when it's sitting in park. I'm sure they could improve it, but as another poster mentioned, maybe it's in a sentry mode or similar.
I have an e-bike that I almost never plug in and it holds its charge just fine with almost no depletion after several months of sitting.
Your mileage will vary :)
(source: the internet, so...)
I even made sure everything was turned off.
My Tesla M3 (LFP for the record, I doubt it matters) was parked in my garage for about 25 days while I was abroad and it lost about 2%. Not 2% per day, 2% overall.
Recently I was away for a week and when I came back it was at the exact % I had left it.
Source: I have a 6 year old Renault Zoe with more than 95% of it's original capacity. The only thing that's wearing out is the suspension and interior. The battery will outlast 3 chassis at this rate, it it was possible to transfer it to a new car.
Same goes for Teslas. The official Tesla service will always replace the whole slab for massive $$$$. Smaller independent shops (mostly self-taught currently) can replace individual failed blocks from donor batteries pretty cheaply. (Less money than an head gasket change or a clutch replacement.)