Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

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The real scandal isn’t just battery degradation… it’s that manufacturers have zero incentive to solve it. Your car becoming worthless after a decade suits them down to the ground.

Battery swapping changes the game entirely. Imagine a national network of exchange stations (co-located with existing petrol infrastructure, you can use the overhead canopy for solar). Standard pack sizes scaled by vehicle class: compact cars get 2 cells, vans get 4, lorries get 8.

Whoever owns these battery packs now has skin in the game for longevity. Their profit depends on keeping packs in service for 20+ years, not selling you a new car.

Suddenly the R&D money flows towards batteries that last, obsolescence now costs them money, and isn’t a happy accident that keeps you hooked on buying more cars.

You’d still have the option to buy your own packs outright if you only ever charge at home, but the network creates the economic pressure for genuine improvement of longevity in battery tech that’s completely missing today.

I’m aware that a company called “Better Place” failed. But they were a startup trying to strong-arm the automotive industry. A nationally coordinated infrastructure concern is different, and the air quality data from this study suggests we can’t afford to keep muddling through - and I really think that peoples concerns about batteries are not misplaced.

Perfect is the enemy of good, but damned if we can’t at least align incentives for better.

Battery swapping is a dead technology, it is simply not economical. It is too expensive, much harder to scale and incompatible with cell-to-chassis designs. Industry barely managed to agree on a charging connector!

Meanwhile, battery longevity is essentially a solved problem. Manufacturers do have an incentive to improve it due to customer demand, and modern NMC chemistry, cooling and BMS have improved significantly to the point where they're expected to maintain 70-85% capacity after 10 years[1], far from worthless. At this point, components like the motor likely fail before the battery does.

Given the much lower failure rate of everything else in an EV, TCO is dramatically better than ICE cars even with degradation[3].

Manufacturers like Mercedes even guarantee 70% health after 8 years (a worst-case estimate).

There is a significant commercial incentive for aftermarket battery repair shops. EVClinic[2] is very successful and a glimpse into the future.

[1]: https://www.geotab.com/blog/ev-battery-health/

[2]: https://evclinic.eu/

[3]: https://evclinic.eu/2025/12/31/diesel-mythology-vs-ev-realit...

believe it when I see it.

no car you can buy with this longevity tech, no phone either- same issue.

The Tesla Model S has been out for almost 13 years, so you can already see it.

Your phone doesn't have liquid cooling temp management and is probably recharged daily. With a car that has 300 miles range, a lot of people probably only do a full cycle every week.

It was recently in the media that old Tesla’s are now worthless once the batteries are dead and that this is happening now.

Heres one such source but theres hundreds if you care to look: https://min.news/en/auto/2a2636e0ac962b5d94ee68babcd09a3d.ht...

So 7000 to 8000 euros to replace a battery of a 80 to 100k car?

It depends on how many miles it has driven and how much other maintenance the car has had. It's a big expense but a battery dying is probably comparable to a timing belt breaking, those aren't cheap either and thats not even for luxury cars...

where did you get that number?

parts and labour is $15,000 to $22,000 from all sources I can find.

Heres one: https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/tesla-battery-replace...

First of all, as your article shows, batteries rarely need replacement at all, even at very high mileage. And those are old vehicles, battery management and cell chemistry are much better now.

And when they do, it's usually just a few cells that need replacing. In Europe, there are specialized third party repair shops that can do it a fraction of the cost of a new battery: https://www.smart-emotion.de/article/431-cell-replacement-at...

Lots of real world data shows that the TCO of EVs is much lower - fewer moving parts, less complexity, less maintenance.

The article linked speaks of 70 to 80k yuan, which I then turned into euros

for parts only, in china

but, sure, fair enough.

Old ICE cars are also usually dead when major drivetrain parts fail after a decade and a half.

For old ice car the solution often is to swap with used parts from wrecked vehicles. Not suitable for batteries.

We had a 2010 Ford Transit van (diesel) and after 189000km, we sold it because the parts were becoming too hard to source (disclaimer: in New Zealand).

For old EVs the solution is to deal with used parts from wrecked vehicles. It can absolutely be suitable for batteries.

> are now worthless once the batteries are dead

13 years old dead luxury cars are worthless, yes, especially when the tech is quickly evolving. That doesn't say anything about how long it takes for them to die or how reliable the tech is.

And even those those ancient luxury cars can often be repaired by a third-party shop like EVClinic.

There aren't many 10+ year old EVs yet, and demand is limited. This is changing, and EVClinic will be the first of many aftermarket EV repair shops.

Battery degradation is largely overhyped and there is growing real world data to illustrate that in practice it's not a dealbreaker. Million mile batteries now exist.

Show me a million mile gas/diesel engine.

Also let's not forget that Toyota has a well funded corporate program rewarding employees to spread anti-EV propaganda.

You mean this, or something else; https://www.motorbiscuit.com/ev-battery-last-3-million-miles...

A theoretical battery that is not actively produced, let alone actually gone the distance…?

On the other side I can tell you at least SaaB has had a million mile ICE car, from 1989. There’s assuredly more than this.

> 1989 Saab 900 SPG - 1 Million Miles

https://www.saabplanet.com/1989-saab-900-spg-with-1-million-...

Modern EVs with thermal management simply haven't been around for long enough for a significant quantity to reach 1 million miles, especially those with LFP cells.

There are some taxis and limo service Teslas that famously did make it to 300-400k+ miles on their original pack.

The technology exists, CATL is offering a million-mile/15 year warranty for some of their packs: https://chargedevs.com/newswire/catl-warrants-its-new-ev-bat...

It's a solved problem. When you consider TCO, EVs win even if the battery needs replacement.

> it’s that manufacturers have zero incentive to solve it. Your car becoming worthless after a decade suits them down to the ground.

They've been aiming for the same or worse in regular cars for over a decade now.

That being said, there is an incentive for EVs: competition from China:

https://www.electrive.com/2026/01/19/byd-extends-battery-war...

Very much like when Japanese cars first got a foothold in the US.

I get what you’re saying but I think it misses that battery longevity can be a competitive advantage for the companies with better technology.

The Nissan Leaf 15 years ago came with a 5-year/100,000km battery warranty, now Toyota are at 10-year/1,000,000km.

You’d be proving me wrong with this fact if the data showed that they’re moving more units because of this marketing.

As it stands the Nissan Leaf is an outlier only in Norway, where it was practically a free car due to subsidies, otherwise their growth is pretty much in line with other EVs.

I was giving the Leaf as an example of a worse warranty offering from 15 years ago sorry. Toyota now have the longer warranty compared to all the others, and even as a fairly poor EV they’re hugely popular with taxi drivers etc.

I’m a bit EV obsessed so spend a lot of time answering questions about them online, the longer warranty is 100% impacting buying choices.

This seems like something EV buyers would care about. If they don't, it raises the question of why a solution is needed at all.

“I’ll sell my car before it becomes an issue” - common statement I’ve heard.

It needs to be fixed, because aside from someone being left with the economic bag of disposing of the vehicle, it is actually an environmental issue to build these batteries.

Just not as bad of an issue as running ICE cars for the same period of time.

People tend not to think more than a certain amount of time away for some reason.

It is a horrible setup that the manufacturers would much rather sell you a new car than a new battery.

We saw this play out with phones. We used to have easily swappable batteries. And since battery chemistry was (and hopefully still is and will continue) improving, by the time you actually swapped the battery there were ones around with a higher capacity than the battery the phone shipped with. And typically for little money.

Now everything is glued and messy to swap so the manufacturer can sell you a battery swap for much much more money than it used to cost.

I believe cars should have swappable somewhat standardized batteries. Even if not swappable by the user, it should not be a more than 1h job at the mechanic (ANY mechanic, not just the manufacturer).

Imagine picking a car and not caring about battery at all. You want a Tesla but BYD batteries are better - so get a Tesla without a Battery and put a BYD one it it. Or maybe Tesla has the best batteries right now, so you get that. And once you have to swap the battery, you again just pick the best manufacturer at the time - who might not even be a car manufacturer at all but rather someone specialized in batteries exclusively.

And since hopefully 10 years have passed since you bought the last battery, chemistry has improved so you pick from options that are all (hopefully a lot) better than the battery you had initially.

We could have some proper competition where manufacturers would have to compete on pricing and performance.

But car manufacturers don't care. They want as much of your money as they can get. And opening their cars to third party batteries and not keeping up as many walls as they can is the opposite of that.

So until forced by regulation every manufacturer will continue to put batteries in their cars that only they themselves will sell and put a slightly different one in every car. So guess what, even if you swap your battery in 10 years, they will sell you the same battery you can buy right now. Because the newer stuff is for new cars only and compatible with your car.

Anecdata, my i3 range was not perceptibly reduced after ~8 years, 82k miles. But the pack was thermally managed, and from what I understand, also didn’t allow you to go to true 0 or true 100 SOC.

Tesla lets you use it all, which gets bigger range numbers (for a time) but at the cost of degradation, if you use it.

It will take a regulator fix. Likely from the EU, who brought us USBC instead of plugpack hell.

So you don't think the free market will force manufactures to compete on better batteries? I always thought the benefit of the free market was that it forced companies to compete on product quality... /s

To be honest with you, the free market does work when incentives are aligned.

If you get maximum profit from the maximum social good, people will do that (or find a way to cheat); but as it stands, theres money to be made in not doing this and the consumer won’t care too much if its 9 years or 10 years that their car lasts, so its not hurting sales to not fix this (even if fixed perfectly, it would take 10 years to prove after all!).

I think I’m dreaming, the investment would have to be enormous, who wants to hold stock of so many batteries? Who will convince manufacturers to integrate standardised batter packs instead of the more profitable “built-in phone style” that is used today, and the automotive marketing machine is really strong and will (correctly) lean on the idea that by having the battery replaceable would require less rigid car bodies, so their current incentive would be to fight this initiative and they would probably lead with the safety angle.

The anti-EV propaganda already works pretty well with the very little it has to work with (farming batteries is harmful), so, imagine what they could do with something of actual substance.

>The anti-EV propaganda already works pretty well

Is that why EV sales have absolutely sky rocketed?

That’s because of the government subsidies.

The USA's ICE auto industry has been bailed out twice (in 2008 and 1979) and is currently protected from imports.

What free market?

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