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Comment by jayknight | Hacker News Reader

>This is a fairly common fear for people considering a new EV: “Won’t the battery need to be replaced after a few years?”. And I think it’s even more prominent in the second-hand market: “Oh, I’d never buy a second-hand battery!”.

I will admit that both of these are nagging on me. I fully intend for my next car to be an EV, but if I was buying today, this would be a factor. I drive a 2013 Camry (that I got used) that shows no signs of slowing down. I hope to drive it for at least a few more years. If the car is still reliable when it's time to send a kid in it to college, that's probably when I'll start looking for something new. And you can show me studies all day long, but my irrational brain is just worried that I won't be able to get 15+ years out of an EV because there just aren't that many 15 year old EVs driving around today.

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Don't forget that internal combustions engines lose power and efficiency over their lifetimes. Bearings, piston rings and other components wear, injectors and valves get dirty, surfaces develop varnish, etc. My last ICE car started needing a quart of oil every few months and that was with very good maintenance and not being driven hard.

I've been curious about how the degradation compares to EVs. I'm aware it's different kind of wear and that there's different ways to mitigate and repair EVs vs ICE, but they both have their own lifetimes and loss of performance.

I believe the difference between ICE degradation and EV degradation is that the EV one actually affects the car's range.

While it is true that your car might consume more oil, and some other component might need replacing, its range, assuming it has been serviced properly, should be similar to what you could get out of it new.

I do wonder if the sum of the costs of getting the ICE car back to mint condition will be the same as getting some cells replaced so you get full range again.

> While it is true that your car might consume more oil, and some other component might need replacing, its range, assuming it has been serviced properly,

Well, until it dies completely (or to the point that servicing it would be more expensive to repair than replace). Then it's range abruptly drops to 0. We won't know for sure until we have more older EVs, but it may well be that EVs last much longer than that at 70-80% range. Which, especially if starting ranges increase, may be a very useful amount of range.

It's true we can't shake mainstream obsession with range, but I also think most people are a bit hesitant to take their 175,000 mile gasoline cars on long road trips. Not because of range, but because it just might break.

So old EVs can be just like old gas cars - used around town rather than for long road trips.

We road tripped our 2005 240K+ mile CR-V 750 miles each way every Christmas without a worry. We’d still be road-tripping in that if a negligent Subaru driver hadn’t rear-ended us and pushed us into a Prius ahead as the middle car in a sandwich.

The car before that was a 1998 Mercedes diesel with 225K+ miles on it that retired only because of body rust not mechanicals.

It helps that I did all the maintenance, so I knew how reliable they were.

Cars are insanely reliable and people get irrationally fearful when a car turns 100K and then again at 200K.

Agreed. I don't suspect "you are most people" but you can try to convince me otherwise.

What I said was what I think most people do. Not what is possible.

Do a lot of people sell a car that’s never once left them stranded at under 175K miles out of concern? Sure.

But I think most people who daily drive 175K mile cars would rely on them for a road trip without much consternation.

Almost no one does maintenance regular enough to have cars that haven’t grenaded something well before that point.

I know people that have literally never changed their oil.

One plus for electric cars though, fewer side effects for that kind of thing I guess?

They definitely loose fuel efficiency over time, so they go less far on the same filled fuel tank. Its not as dramatic as a 20% loss but its not nothing either.

I own a 2018 Model S with ~140k miles on it. I have primarily Supercharged it, and have driven it across the continental US several times. It has only lost 8-10% of original range. I get it, lifecycle anxiety is to be expected, but the evidence is fairly robust these batteries will last (and at least in the case of Tesla and my use case, I have an aftermarket person I work with in North Carolina who can provide me refurbished packs if needed).

Here is a 2018 Model S with 400k miles on it, although it's original battery was replaced under warranty: https://insideevs.com/news/717654/tesla-model-s-400k-mile-ba...

(I tried to import a BYD vehicle to the US, with an unfavorable outcome)

Your car is only 70% of the way through it's nominal lifespan. It seems like battery life is holding up well, but we'll find out a lot more as many of these cars begin their second decade of service, quite often with less rigorous maintenance. I suspect many/most EVs will make it to 300k and 12 years, but the oldest (truly) mass produced Model S are only just now turning 10 years old.

Certainly, we should keep collecting more data, but the longevity and lifecycle trajectory is obvious.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ev-battery-life

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01698-1

https://old.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1jvwi14/g...

https://www.thejubjubbirds.com/hit-and-run-on-the-energy-tra...

> Just purchased a 2015 Tesla Model S 70D for $9k (USD). It was very worth it. It still holds about 88% of its charge after 175k miles. There are also some positive factors you didn’t mention.

The top commenter from the post just purchased a 10 year old EV that they judge to be perfectly good and unlikely to die on them soon.

I do think the anxiety about batteries is somewhat justified today, because the capacities are small enough that only have 80% capacity available could be a problem. But once the batteries are larger, I suspect EVs will actually last significantly longer than ICE cars on average.

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