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Comment by PaulKeeble | Hacker News Reader

The projection on most of these batteries life times now is 500k+ miles before they hit 80% of their capacity. The car around the battery will be falling to pieces before they reach that point. Its not like there weren't quite a lot of ICE lemon vehicles with engine and other problems that caused issues, its always been part of any industry and there will still be packs in the future that don't perform as they should for as long as they are meant to.

EVs generally will require less maintenance as they are substantially simpler vehicles with less moving parts.

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Cells often get sold with a "# of charge/discharge cycles until you hit 80% capacity" rating, at least on the 18650 datasheets I've looked at. So my guess is that they took that number and multiplied by the range per cycle.

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).

And not all 18650 cells are equal, there's no way to know what's actually used.

That really depends on your definition of complexity. After all, EV charging points have far fewer moving parts than a gas pump, yet we know how reliable they are.

I used to work at a gas station. They are not more reliable, not even close. The difference is that a gas pump is never unattended and the attendants can quickly do the easy fixes, like a reboot.

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.

Gas pumps are operated by customers in many parts of the world

But there's always a human around somewhere.

There are quite a few unattended stations in NZ

The Tesla superchargers have had perfect reliability in my experience, and it seems others agree that they are highly reliable.

Right, so reliability is mostly unrelated to the percieved mechanical or physical complexity.

The problem isn't just the number of moving parts; it's far simpler to design a common gas pump than it is to design a DC fast charger, the electronics inside, the software, the network connectivity, app development, and, most importantly, the ability to successfully handshake with every single EV out there (easier said than done).

Exactly. It's possible to build an incredibly reliable mechanical system, and all-too-possible to build a very unreliable system with no moving parts and lots of software (and network connectivity).

Lack of vibration from Engine might also fare better for parts around the battery

Engines vibrations aren’t really a problem on modern vehicles. You get some, but they’re incredibly tiny compared to conditions. Heck, even on my 25 year old car I don’t really have engine vibrations.

When I do get vibrations, it’s almost always from unbalanced wheels/tires.

I’m an automotive EE.

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.

Not sure what kind of EV you have. Ours goes over 150 km most weekdays, somewhere beteeen 20 km and 200 km on weekend days, and has taken the family on multiple 1000 km or more road trips now.

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.

You present a valid argument but I think comparing an EV being charged every morning to not always having a full fuel tank in an ICE, in the morning, is apples to oranges. From that perspective the EV has an advantage but it’s not a direct comparison.

You sometimes don't have full tank every morning because that's when you go full up. Going to fill up is a chore much different from plugging it at home .

Charging up at a station is still a bigger chore but on a different relaxed way

This is my experience. We use the EV for everything, except drives to West Texas — although I saw plenty of EVs in Alpine, and a few down in Terlingua(!). If I had a no-shit 400 mile EV, I'd never look back.

Or more chargers in West Texas?

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.

> Not sure what kind of EV you have.

Time in/on?

Almost all of them including Ferrari.

Is your critique of this study that they didn’t use real world conditions?

My critique is that the original claim that the vehicle will fail before the battery is entirely BS. Is that a plain enough way to say it?

The vehicle will be a ship of Theseus situation before the battery fails =)

Better hope you keep it parked in temperature controlled storage.

My brother in law has a model year 2014 Model S still on the road for daily driving. What's the difference?

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.

EV sales now account for just over 90% of new cars in Norway. This in a country with a winter that’s brutal on range and where people love to drive 2-6 hours to get to their cabin on top of a mountain. I also regularly see people write about their road trips to the other side of Europe on forums.

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.

Btw, if you’re talking about models being launched in 2032 or later, then those will almost certainly be very niche models that will have very limited sales.

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.

> These EVa are just not replacements for ICE.*

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.

Cool story and all, but no, I’m not telling you may use.

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.

Huh? Literally millions of people worldwide have replaced their ICE vehicles with EVs. Granted, there are some use cases where ICE is the better choice, but no one is seriously suggesting that EVs will replace ICE 100 percent.

Assume at least 1/2 are people that will learn a lesson in marketing.

It’s been an assumption trap on both sides. The current gen of EV marketing will go down in history books.

Like I said, most people don't need more than a "town car". The average American commute is 42 miles per day (~68km in regular units).

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

>EVs generally will require less maintenance as they are substantially simpler vehicles with less moving parts.

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.

The huge repair bills are in big part due to the fact that there are no spare parts.

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... =)

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