The guide to real-world EV battery health
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Look at Hyundai/Kia’s lineup. The Niro, EV6, and EV9 are essentially the three major segments of American car preferences. They aren’t particularly fast or exotic.
They don’t really cost a whole lot more to buy/own than alternatives in the same segment especially on a monthly payment or buying one used, they just aren’t chosen at a high rate compared to gas powered alternatives.
Tesla just used the neck-snapping acceleration to market EVs by cool factor rather than by economics. And that was a smart idea to get people in showrooms.
The Niro however is spot on.
The 6-7s EVs feel much faster than that!
I'm also curious to hear your source for the subsidies - from what I can see China has spent anywhere from 3x to 5x propping up the domestic EV industry as the US has over the last 15 years. The US had Tesla which almost went bankrupt multiple times despite the subsidies; China has a dozen EV manufacturers, half of whom are on life support now that the government is withdrawing subsidies.
The best source IMO is the commission that came up with the European countervailing duty of 17%.
I'm not trying to attack the impressiveness of the Chinese EV industry, because it's going to be an important part of the future. But saying that Chinese EVs are banned in the US purely because they are too good is incomplete. A big part of why they are banned, and why the US and China have such a frosty relationship, is because Chinese trade tactics are not fair to non-state-backed competitors.
Your point about fairness is interesting because that's a position the US has given up on, especially since 2025. The European EV tariffs of 17/34 percent are fair-ish. The 100% American tariffs never were
If Chinese EV manufacturers put their vehicles through these tests, include all the mandatory features, and strip out the forbidden telemetry (certain manufacturers are banned in the US for reporting to the CCP- most notably but not exclusive to Huawei) then they too can be sold here.
If anything is preventing Chinese EVs from the US market, it's almost certainly their electronic components.
It’d be nice if affordable EV models were available from direct to consumer companies. If one could go online and buy a $22k electric hatchback that shows up in your driveway with zero haggling, it’s difficult to imagine it not selling well.
I thought this was mostly* a side-effect of electric motors inherently behaving differently than combustion motors.
* Not that it can't be deliberately turned off since everything goes through a computer.
Having said that, there are some that are fairly mediocre without being completely terrible. The FWD Equinox EV as well as the FWD EV9 are acceptable to some people, but also pretty slow cars.
One, as you noted, is that electric motors can apply full torque from a stop, increasing perceived acceleration.
The other, and more impactful, is that electric motor power scales with cost much more cheaply than gas motors, so vehicles will oversize their electric motors.
If you can charge a car in 20 minutes, the battery and some other circuitry can support discharging in 20 minutes, which is an insane power level.
I think the larger third factor is regenerative braking. That uses the exact same circuitry as powering the motors, and if you want to be able to brake quickly without the brake pads, that's a lot of kW to be absorbed.
Any way you cut it, I agree, it's an insane power level.
All that fast DC charging requires are cells capable of handling the current.
You don't get a powerful motor for free just because you can fast charge.
Which is the most expensive part of an EV
I think a motor with half the output would still result in a great ride, but the car would've been cheaper/lighter.
Newer EV's come out with much smaller motors it seems, which makes sense to me.
That's pretty much the order of "greenness" in personal transport.
New EVs will pay off their added carbon footprint in roughly 1 or 2 years in most locations. The ultimate determining factor of how fast that is the energy mix of your local power generation.
The only time it'd probably be better to continue using an ICE is if that ICE is a moped or you live in West Virginia and drive a hybrid. For pretty much all other vehicle choices, switching to an EV will be greener.
New EV vs used ICE will depend on how much you drive and in what conditions. I would guess what I do (in the UK) is uncommon in the US but it must be possible but working from home plus living in a town rather than a city means I only do low single digit thousands of miles a year and that almost entirely on clear roads.
People in much of the UK commute by public transport and use their cars lightly (e.g. for shopping on the weekend, trips, etc).
Glad you asked.
Biking has an energy efficiency of around 99%. Very little of the effort you put into biking ends up as waste heat. Walking, on the other hand, has a much lower energy efficiency. You are putting much more effort overcoming and generating friction as you move your legs. You are also doing it for a longer period of time since you are going slower.
It's one of my favorite counterintuitive facts.
> I would guess what I do (in the UK) is uncommon in the US
And that's for sure. In almost every US city if you want to do anything, you are driving. Where I'm at, everything is at least 10mi from my home. That racks up the miles pretty quickly.
Transportation and exercise are linked. Walking kills two birds with one stone.
How many co2 tons are generated in making a new Nissan leaf?
I suspect it's much lower than that number now-a-days. Primarily because the energy going into batteries production will both use less power and likely comes from greener power sources.
If nissan is to be believed, since then they've cut the CO2 emissions from production by 40%. So maybe in the range of 9T?
The sunk cost fallacy applies not only to dollars, but also to any quantitative phenomenon. The important thing to evaluate is the cost going forward. When you look at the cost of that new Nissan Leaf, you need to amortize the initial carbon cost over the rest of its lifetime, not just the few years you have it!
Biking is less demanding on some parts of the body that only can take so much stress. So you can push other parts more if that makes sense: top cyclists can do 400-600 W sustained or 1-2 kW in short sprints. That's not less exercise, that's several times more than a walker or runner can do. So in the same time as walking you can either be faster at your destination and save time and/or energy, or go further while spending the same or less energy, or output more energy. The choice is yours.
Anyway, from the CO2 perspective, biking vs walking is splitting hairs really.
Very few people are top cyclists, or top anything else. Top cyclists are doing it as a sport, not as a means of transport.
> Anyway, from the CO2 perspective, biking vs walking is splitting hairs really
I agree. I am responding to people who are claiming it is better than walking to a significant extent.
Well you were mentioning exercise, so I reacted to that. The point is everyone biking as exercise can push more watts than when walking, if they want to.
> Walking does not use fuel so efficiency is not really relevant.
Ah, it is. You eat food, that's fuel. It's the major source of CO2 for both activities. Now, it can be insignificant. If the only food you eat is like oatmeal and beans that you grow yourself, then yeah it's going to have a non-existent impact.
However, if you have any sort of meat or imported foods, that CO2 budget can go up pretty quickly.
The actual energy for making the steel for a bike, which will outlast your children, isn't significant.
That implies all exercise is a bad thing. i think you will find very few people are sufficiently keen to reduce CO2 that they will deliberately get less exercise and damage their health. I am certainly not doing that. At the moment I am trying to get more exercise.
> Bikes require very little steel
Compared to a car, certainly. Compared to shoes, an awful lot.
> a bike, which will outlast your children
The typical life span of a bike seems to be about five and ten year years. I really hope my kids last a reasonable multiple of the top end! The level of sales of cycles in the UK (well over 1 million a year) vs the number of people who cycle at least once a week (less seven million) implies a life of about five years. About half of that is leisure cyclists so not really comparable to people using transport to get somewhere.
Leisure cyclists want to get more exercise so by your argument about that being a bad thing they (and therefore half of all UK cyclists) are actively harmful.
https://road.cc/content/news/uk-cycle-sales-plummet-early-19...
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/64e71a4f20ae8...
It takes 2-4 years of that mileage alone for a new EV to reach lifetime emissions parity with a new ICE in the EU (which I know is longer than the US due to the vast differences in average emissions per vehicle between the two continents).
For most of the world, the GP is correct. Driving whatever car you have will always be more environmentally friendly than buying a new EV. Reduce and reuse are environmental cornerstones for a reason.
Which is why I put a used EV as being better for the environment vs a new one.
But both will be better for the environment in their lifetime than keeping a used ICE on the road.
It's more economical to keep your current car until it starts seeing major mechanical issues. However, environmentally an EV will (almost) always beat an ICE, the sooner you get one the better. Especially in a place like the EU where you can get even more environmentally friendly EVs due to the lower amounts of driving. You can, for example, grab the BYD seagull which has a 30kWh battery pack. That alone significantly reduces the new EV environmental impact beyond what some of the older numbers would have shown.
This is simply not true. A new EV will not reach emissions parity with a used ICE car in its average useful lifetime (12.5 years).
This isn't close or controversial, so I wonder what the basis for your mistaken belief otherwise is? Not even EV companies make this claim.
If your used ICE vehicle has 15 to 25,000mi in it, then yeah, replacing it with an EV today is the better choice. It's more a matter of when it will be the better choice.
This is only not true if you have very low yearly milages or a particularly efficient ICE. Which, maybe you do.
[1] https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/dec/06/carbon-dioxid...
That's the payoff period for the carbon differential between a new EV and a new ICE, not a new EV and your existing ICE, where the carbon cost of production is already sunk. Hence why the GP commented that keeping your ICE is environmentally better than buying a new EV.
Also note that 15-25k miles is 24-40k km, or 2.4-4 years of the average annual mileage in the EU. That's to break even with a new ICE. To break even with a second hand ICE, it's on the order or 15-20 years, or effectively longer than the useful life of the EV.
> If your used ICE vehicle has 15 to 25,000mi in it, then yeah, replacing it with an EV today is the better choice. It's more a matter of when it will be the better choice.
This claim is simply false. There is no point in the lifetime of a used ICE where replacing it with a new EV will result in reduce overall emissions.
No, that's to break even with a new EV per the article I posted.
I'd love to see a source that says otherwise. I think you have a bad source for the CO2 emissions of new EV production.
> One common claim is that electric vehicles have higher emissions associated with battery manufacturing. While manufacturing emissions for battery electric cars are roughly 40% higher than for gasoline cars, the ICCT’s research shows that this initial “emissions debt” is typically offset after around 17,000 kilometers of driving, usually within the first one to two years of use in Europe.
The emissions debt is relative to a new ICE.
In cradle-to-grave emissions, electric cars are much lower than ICE cars in lifetime carbon footprint, often 50% lower.
That doesn't change the fact the replacing a used ICE with a new EV will result in increased overall emissions and increase the net carbon footprint.
> I'd love to see a source that says otherwise. I think you have a bad source for the CO2 emissions of new EV production.
This is a completely uncontroversial fact and no environmental or governmental bodies make the claim which you are putting forward, so I'd rather like to see your sources.
Source: https://theicct.org/pr-electric-cars-getting-cleaner-faster/...
Just fuzzy eyeballing (I don't see the actual numbers for the manufacturing estimated CO2, just the graph), it looks like ~10% of the lifetime emissions for a new ICE come from manufacturing. That would put the the new EV payback vs used ICE at 4 or 5 years.
At that point, it just sort of depends on how long you hold onto your ICE for.
My wife might be able to do it with the amount she commutes, but for me, working from home, it's utterly laughable.
Every time you fill up on 20 gallons of gas, that is 400 pounds of CO2 that will be dumped into the air.
Used EVs are apparently very cheap. Most new cars are prohibitively expensive, the average new car cost is something like $50k now in the US. If anybody is concerned about cost of new cars, they are buying used anyway.
In my case I already own a hybrid that I only drive 2000 mi/yr and there is not yet an EV that I could buy with so little embodied carbon that it would make sense to do so. At the rate China is decarbonizing, presumably the embodied carbon of their EVs will soon be minimal, but not yet.
Rivian: 60,140 kg carbon per lifetime.
F150, at 20mpg: 78,740 kg carbon, for fuel alone.
So even ignoring the embodied carbon in an ICE vehicle, and paying comparatively high embodied CO2 cost of a new Rivian, it's better to switch immediately, (if CO2 were the sole concern, which it never is.)
What would you compare the Rivian to?
My kid races mountain bikes so I have become extremely familiar with Rivian (and Cybertruck) MTB Dad, and I think they are a joke. With only a little planning I can get three bikes and three riders in a Honda Insight, while R1T Dad needs an optional accessory to get even one bike in the bed. People choosing these things are, 99% of the time, not behaving rationally. They are buying luxury goods that they believe signal their environmental credentials.
The cultural irrationality of the truck/car market in the US crosses all ethnicities and class lines. If we are trying to evaluate the effectiveness of EVs, I think we need to compare the Rivian to the closest fossil fuel powered vehicle, even if it's something that causes me to disrespect the people making these choices.
Really? I could imagine it being significantly longer than an average EV, but never? Regardless of driving pattern? Got a link or can you show your math?
According to the company itself, their bloated truck-like luxury object has double the emissions of a normal hybrid car.
The median length of car ownership is something like 7 years. Even if you are switching between used cars, most people are switching vehicles at some point.
From what I understand even considering battery mining and using dirty electrical generation, you’re still at breakeven within a couple years of driving with an EV.
Yeah lithium mining is bad, but don’t forget that oil is also extracted and “mine.” And your gas car uses a LOT of it.
I wouldn’t think too much about then average new car cost of $50k. That average is skewed by:
1. Expensive new car purchases (average != median)
2. Lower income people don’t buy new cars at all.
Still, some of the best new car deals are EVs because dealers can’t get rid of them due to the sudden expiration of federal incentives. Plus the used ones depreciate like crazy despite having better maintenance and lower miles. The lease deals you might get on an Ioniq are insane, good luck getting a gas car lease with that kind of value.
Let’s also not forget that the majority of housing units in the USA are single family homes where charging at home is likely to be an option.
> From what I understand even considering battery mining and using dirty electrical generation, you’re still at breakeven within a couple years of driving with an EV.
Only when compared to buying a new ICE, as it takes 1-2 years average mileage in the US and 2-4 years in the EU for a new EV to reach emissions parity with a new ICE. It takes well over a decade in the EU for a new EV to recover it's production emissions va driving an existing used ICE. It's never environmentally friendly to scrap an ICE for a new EV.
My car's first set of tires were very bald at 25,000 miles. That's not unusual on new cars in general as they seem to come from the factory with low longevity tires, but it's still quite a short tire life.
Yes anything in a gasoline engine is gone, and brakes get less use.
But there are still maintenance items.
I've gone back and forth on this. When you buy an EV your old ICE vehicle is not destroyed, it continues it's lifecycle when it goes to someone else. Moreover, there's value in sending a market signal in buying an EV, which is important at this stage of transition.
Maybe the argument is about average age of the road fleet? That a used ICE vehicle should be replaced with a used EV?
In many cases, this is rational. Yeah, a used Model 3 with a great rate plan is probably worth it as a commuter, but what if you are an outlier? Even a low battery failure rate can be a risk, and extended warranties are expensive.
But also, some of it is irrational, as the FB comments effectively feed many false fear driven narratives.
Brings a tear to my eye.
What kind of car you buy is a simple but very impactful choice. One that many people are not making due to misinformation.
No thanks. I will instead actually do something to help the planet by continuing to drive decades year old vehicles whose production costs have long since been amortized, and which have much lower maintenance cost.
Bonus: I can also safely park my old automobiles indoors without any worry of spontaneous combustion. #winning
Another bonus: People all the time chat me up about my old automobiles, wanting to buy them. EV owners don't have the same experience for some reason.
The article never answers the question. But if you assume 70% end-of-life threshold with 2.3% loss per year - then we're looking at 13 years.
We’ve noticed after 6 years out Tesla, the battery seems to charge slower than it used to, but otherwise all is well. I just love the convenience of charging at home, gas stations seem so odd and antiquated now.
I myself have a 11 year old Nissan Leaf with pretty significant battery degradation (the guessometer says 70 mi range but I wouldn't count on more than 35-40) and it's fine for probably 95% of my driving.
If I were to buy an electric car with 300-350 miles of range today, I could easily see myself finding a ton of value in it in 20 or even 30 years. It's still more range than my current one! Lol.
"When the battery degrades to a certain point, for instance, if a battery can only retain 80% of its initial capacity,9, 10, 11 the battery should be retired to ensure the safety and reliability of the battery-powered systems."
Xiaosong Hu, Le Xu, Xianke Lin, Michael Pecht, Battery Lifetime Prognostics, Joule, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2020, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
My EV gets only 230mi range at max, and I only charge to 85% which is like 190mi. But I do it at home and never have any range anxiety.
The trajectories for battery improvements indicate it is just a matter of time before those with larger range needs are addressed satisfactorily.
If you cannot slow charge at home or work, it’s a tough story, EV’s aren’t right for you yet, and that’s ok. Roll out of slow charging is less clear that it will be solved in a scaled way. I am not one that believes that 5-10m EV charging is a good goal, it’s very high power and likely not a good price trade off for the time saved. Current 20-30m will likely be the broad solution for those that want EV and cannot charge at home, though I think that’s not a very good solution.
My old '07 Focus would get about 260 or so miles between visits to the gas station.
If you have to drive 250 miles every day for work, or you don't have kids and can do 3 hour legs on trips without stopping, then get a gas car.