> At that point, a Tesla will have more than 80% of its initial capacity, and in some cases, even more. So people will probably give up their car, well, well before the battery gets close to becoming a burden.
I looked into the secondhand EV market (in Norway). In doing so I read quite a bit of academic research to figure out the lifetime of an EV. Apparently the 80% capacity is the accepted end of life for an EV battery:
"For batteries, 80% of the initial capacity is referred to as the point after which it tends to exhibit an exponential decay of capacity and is considered an unreliable power source after this point for EV application" [1]
So, the Tesla the article talks about won't be much good, or at least not for very long.
That's statistical. A small number will start their exponential degrade at 80%, but most won't. Some might get to 60% before they start it. So if you're at 83% at 200,000 miles you don't really know whether you have 50,000 more or you have 200,000 more on the battery. And "exponential degrade" doesn't mean it's particularly fast. It means it's faster to degrade from 80 to 60 than it is from 100 to 80. You're not going to get 500,000 miles out of driving until the battery hits 60% but you might get a substantial fraction.
The rest of the car almost certainly doesn't have 200,000 more miles in it, so who cares?
Why do you think a vehicle with 200,000 miles on it doesn't have 200,000 more miles in most of the components? It isn't remotely difficult to imagine that being possible. One of my ICE vehicles was 299,648 miles when a component in the transmission gave out. The only reason I didn't repair it was around a decade earlier someone had bent the frame. If I had been willing to replace that part, I would still be driving it today.
People replace vehicles because they want and can afford replacement ones, not because they are mileage limited.
I drive my vehicles for 300-500k miles. The drive train should be the only thing that wears out and that can be replaced with used drive trains from a wrecking yard.
> The rest of the car almost certainly doesn't have 200,000 more miles in it, so who cares?
This what I find curious. It used to be cars were largely limited by their main driveline components. Now those components have been simplified. In a lot of the BYD cars it is literally the exact same driveline so for them it is almost commoditised.
My part of the world sees no snow or salt. So if the body is fine and the driveline is fine....
Why can't I run a car for a million miles and simply replace coils, struts, hubs, bearings, carpets, seats, the-tiny-electric-motors-that-drive-windows-and-seats-and-mirrors etc?
IE where is the electric version of the old landcruiser series?
> That's statistical. A small number will start their exponential degrade at 80%, but most won't. Some might get to 60% before they start it.
The paper that underpins the 80% claim is paywalled and I'm cheap so don't have the numbers to hand. But in the abstract sense being statistical could go the other way too - i.e. some might get to 90% before they start their exponential decay.
> And "exponential degrade" doesn't mean it's particularly fast.
True, exponential doesn't mean much other than e^n where it's implied that n > 1. However the value of n does matter, for example a decay rate for n=100 is quite different than n=1.1. Again, we're talking in general terms as I don't have the value of n for this. For better or worse, I'm taking the paper at face value when it talks of end of life at 80% - however it has been peer reviewed and is in a "proper" journal so to my mind that adds some credibility.
It's worth mentioning that the current DoE guidance on lifetimes is: "12 to 15 years in moderate climates (8 to 12 years in extreme climates)". Of course that guidance is also based on a statistical analysis that doesn't seem to account for modern battery management systems [1]. There are additional factors at play that govern battery degradation, including things like: battery chemistry, environment, EV charging habits, etc.
Ultimately the real test of EV battery life will come with time. It'll manifest as the change in average age of scrapped vehicles with large fleets of EV's on the road. In Norway right now it's about 18 years (for a mostly internal combustion fleet) [2]. However as of this year all private vehicles sold must be zero-emission - so in 10-20 years we'll have some interesting data [3].
> For batteries, 80% of the initial capacity is referred to as the point
The publication cites sources from 15 years ago for this "fact" [0]. That's ancient history in the context of EVs (even before the first reliable mass production EV - Tesla's Model S - was initially released). As a practical matter, the article points out that most EV manufacturers (Tesla included) warranty their batteries for at least 70% capacity at timespans near a decade, which would bankrupt them all if EV batteries just up and died at 80%.
0)
[35] O. Erdinc, B. Vural, and M. Uzunoglu, ‘‘A dynamic lithium-ion battery
model considering the effects of temperature and capacity fading,’’ in Proc.
Int. Conf. Clean Electr. Power, Jun. 2009, pp. 383–386.
[36] K. Smith, T. Markel, G.-H. Kim, and A. Pesaran, ‘‘Design of electric drive
vehicle batteries for long life and low cost,’’ in Proc. Accelerated Stress
Test. Rel. (ASTR), IEE Workshop, 2010, pp. 6–8.
It is an older paper, though that in itself isn't a reason to discount this (or any science). For example, the DoE still uses an 2014 predictive model to estimate longevity of today's EV batteries at "12 to 15 years in moderate climates (8 to 12 years in extreme climates)" [1]. However as the DoE says, battery longevity depends on a bunch of factors e.g. chemistry, charging patterns, etc.
To the practical matter - yes, EV manufacturers are very careful with warranty periods. Anecdotally, an acquaintance had a Tesla for 8 years. 6 months after the 8-year battery warranty expired the battery ceased working. The details were a little unclear (it was explained in broken English/Norwegian). That said, anecdata carries little weight. What we need is more peer-reviewed research to update our understanding of battery longevity. Until we have that we need to rely on the existing published knowledge... otherwise anyone can assert anything and we learn nothing.
I kind of wonder if the tipping point of "exponential decay" might be where a battery starts being charged and discharged more often to reach daily range and maybe outside the 20-80% window you need for a healthy battery.
In other words, if a battery is new and has 200 miles range, but is driven 100 miles a day, it will stay between 20-80% charge each day when charging.
but at 80% capacity, 160 miles range, it must be either charged above 80% or discharged below 20% each day which is unhealthy for the battery. (either 80%->17% or 83%->20%)
as soon as it starts getting out of healthy range I can see how it can degrade faster.
But cars that stay in that range will have a much longer lifespan.
As another comment mentioned, the cited studies are more about how the battery chemistry changes over time, not how people use the EV. That said, EV manufacturers definitely care about driver habits too, since it affects warranty claims and how they configure their battery management systems.
I think modern EVs are set up to charge to a certain percentage of capacity rather than a specific range, kind of like how smartphones do it.
Your point about depth of discharge ( 80%->17% ) makes sense though, since the battery system can't really control someone's driving routine.
> I’d say that it’s more likely to be the perception of battery degradation that pushes the value down, not the actual degradation in reality.
Why guess? This is data that is almost certainly aggregated back to the manufacturer and could be available as a published report. The fact you don't see this report I think is indicative of the reality.
> Pessimism about battery longevity is giving us all cheaper second-hand EVs
The seller sets the price. Not the buyer. You should ask why the seller is willing to let the vehicle go for a lower than expected price for a given number of miles.
> had lost just 15% of their capacity, on average
There are no average batteries. The used vehicle market doesn't work on averages, it generally works on worst cases, particularly in an as-is (no warranty) sale.
> in other words, there was no active cooling of the battery
As it requires a four way valve. That's a common failure point in EVs.
> Many manufacturers provide long warranties for their batteries
Do those often persist through private party sales?
I'm not trying to be mean, I think EVs are great, but hybrids are still obviously better, and the market is far more complex than this author would like to acknowledge. I dislike articles that start with a conclusion and then spend pages trying to justify it. The data to actually answer this question was available but completely unused here. I did not find this convincing or informative.
Think of it this way. There is a segment of the buying market that is hostile to these vehicles by default. Waving your hands with no data to back it up only makes it worse.
I like ICE cars. Someone literally had to pry the keys to my Integra out of my cold, (half-)dead hands. I like EVs: My Bolt's great. I will never own a hybrid, after working with my parents'. They are simply the worst of both worlds: With an ICE, if it breaks, I can probably fix it myself, likely cheaply. With an EV, there are vanishingly few moving parts to break. With a hybrid? All the failure prone parts of an ICE, packed into a smaller engine compartment because they had to stick an entire scaled-down EV in there on top of the ICE parts, making working on them a practice in futility.
With an ICE, I get gas once a week or so. With an EV, I plug my car in overnight a couple times a week, maybe using a fast charger once a month or so when I realize I've neglected to do before a longer trip. With a hybrid, I'm plugging in every night, plus getting gas once a month or so.
With a (manual transmission) ICE, I get to decide my power curve, and know if I slam the peddle to the metal, I can get a LOT of power out of that car. With an ICE, my acceleration is limited mostly by software. With a hybrid, if your EV mode battery gets depleted, the car gets sluggish. Plus, you're dragging around a bunch of dead weight in the form of a battery, so you don't even get respectable acceleration on ICE standards.
On top of all that, hybrids cost more (because they have basically all the parts of an ICE and an EV).
I wonder if you separate plug-in hybrids and non-plug-in hybrids, whether you might gain a more positive opinion of some.
With non-plug-in hybrids, you don't plug them in at night, and you're lugging a lot less battery around. In some sense, you do have all the complications of both, but as an example, the whole planetary gearset, dual motor setup in Toyota's Synergy drive replaces a traditional gearbox and seems to be more reliable and more efficient. I also expected Priuses to have worse reliability than non-hybrid Toyotas, and seem to have been completely wrong.
Also, while what I wrote above probably makes it sounds like I'm against plug-in hybrids, I think of them as a way to reduce the weight of a full electric car, by replacing a lot of the battery weight with a traditional ICE drivetrain, i.e. a range extender/light-weight source of power for acceleration.
I also don't like the weight and complication of modern cars. It's really hard to beat ICE for weight, but seems to be pretty easy to beat it for acceleration and fuel economy at the cost of making it more complicated (and worse handling).
I read a review of the BMW 330e iPerformance once, which messed with my head. They made the point that BMW had basically found a way to make a car heavier, without hurting acceleration or fuel economy (and also not really improving either).
FYI: I am just interested in this area, and have spent way too much time thinking about it. Many people will be more knowledgeable in this space. I just wanted to throw out some ideas to be shot down :)
Edit: Forgot to comment on your Integra - probably nothing modern will rival that for a long time! I was crushed giving up my '94 Celica a couple of years ago when I moved overseas. Basically gave it away!
>The seller sets the price. Not the buyer. You should ask why the seller is willing to let the vehicle go for a lower than expected price for a given number of miles.
The seller sets the asking price; the buyer sets the bid price; and mutual agreement between the buyer and the seller sets the selling price. When sellers set an asking price, they tend to refer to information about previous selling prices, creating a dynamic where buyers influence asking prices.
>Do those often persist through private party sales?
Yes: "Your New Vehicle Limited Warranty will follow your vehicle and be transferred to the new owner when a vehicle ownership transfer is performed through Tesla." (https://www.tesla.com/support/vehicle-warranty) You opened your comment with "Why guess?", so I wonder why you posed this as a question (in such a way as to hint that the answer is "no") when the correct answer was a Google search away.
> I'm not trying to be mean, I think EVs are great, but hybrids are still obviously better
I was 100% with you up until this point. Hybrids have all the mechanical components of ICEs, thus need maintenance and repair just like an ICE vehicle. Additionally they have all the components of an electric. The reduced maintenance of EVS is their greatest strength, in my opinion as an EV owner who was not expecting this benefit.
I've replaced more transmissions and rebuilt more engines than most people you'll meet. The EV drivetrain, even if it has a weak point in the battery, it's such a pleasure to own because of the reduced maintenance. All the money saved on oil, oil filters, plugs, mufflers, replacement stolen catalytic converters, coils, plug wires, fire and air filters, valve gaskets, water pumps, timing chains, lifters, brake pads, and the damned automatic transmission, add up to about the same order as a battery replacement - if that battery replacement is even needed. In the ICE vehicle, all those things are definitely needed.
I completely agree. My father was a truck mechanic and I spent plenty of time under cars turning wrenches. I'm very happy that part of my life is behind me as an BEV owner. My wife still drives an old Accord and I dread the times when it needs an oil/transmission fluid change, muffler replacement, water pump, etc. All of that simply disappears when you switch to a BEV and it really is refreshing not having to think about it at all.
Like a lot of anti-EV commentary^, there's nuance being missed and that is: use case. There is no "X is obviously better" (this is also true for a lot more topics than this)
I have a Nissan Leaf that's perfect for the purposes we bought it, better than a hybrid, far better than a petrol or diesel car. There are also scenarios where a hybrid is better, and there are also scenarios where a great big diesel burning engine is the best option. These gaps are closing though.
^I've had frustrating conversations with relatives when discussing the possibility of buying an EV where they just round-trip through a list of negatives, and I have to explain repeatedly that they don't apply to our use case. Examples:
- Can't tow: I haven't towed anything with any of our ICE cars in years (and we still have the ICE cars anyway)
- Can't take it interstate: We're not planning to take it interstate, and we're not planning on buying one big enough to carry what we'd need for an interstate trip anyway.
- Wouldn't a hybrid be better / safer first option to dip into electric: Not for our very regular and frequent short trips, pure electric is simpler and cheaper, and I've done the research to be confident in the decision.
- Miscellaneous other: We're not actually getting rid of the existing cars (yet) so we're not losing anything you might be worried about us losing.
The Leaf is on track to have saved us nearly $2k in petrol for the year (even taking into account the cost of electricity to charge her). If she lasts another four years she'll have paid for herself.
I agree with you. Cars seem to be discussed as an all or nothing decision process.
Many families where I am have two cars. Both cars spend an inordinate amount of time driving around the city. One car will be the preferred long distance family hauler.
Simply making the other car full electric seems like a no brainer to me.
Manufacturers DO publish reports. Tesla routinely provides data about the lifetimes of their vehicle batteries, which turn out to greatly exceed their warranties. (This shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Manufacturers just can't afford to have high warranty return rates).
The rest of your post is an attempt at hand-waving away what is a real phenomenon. EVs are still new to a lot of people, there's a lot of FUD floating around, and that can affect used vehicle prices. Markets behave irrationally sometimes, and that leads to opportunity. (In this case, getting a value buy on a used EV).
> hybrids are still obviously better
Hybrids are objectively worse. They have less all-electric (efficient, non-polluting) range, they charge more slowly, they have a more complex drivetrain with more parts subject to repair, etc. They're a better fit for a specific market segment, but that segment is small and rapidly becoming non-existent. You can get cheap EVs nowadays that have more range than my last ICE.
> that segment is small and rapidly becoming non-existent
Disagree. People vastly overestimate the complexity of hybrids.
The mechanical and electrical components in a Toyota-style planetary gear based hybrid are much simpler than a standard automatic transmission, and demonstrably more reliable than both a conventional automatic and belt-style CVT.
This is a long way of saying, the specific market segment hybrids are a good fit for is the set of all passenger car customers that an EV is _not_ a good fit for. Anyone buying a Corolla, Civic Rav4 or CR-V should be buying the hybrid, and sales seem to be trending that way.
I just traded in a 6.5 year old model 3 with 75k miles.
Battery was at 87% of capacity.
The big problem was cold snaps. It had the older heating system and would lose a lot of charge in the cold. Our 2022 Model Y with the newer heating system doesn't lose nearly as much charge in cold snaps.
Just had our PTC (resistive electric) heater replaced in a 2018 3 with 110k miles. Sure wish it had a heat pump, but we don't suffer much range as we live in a mild climate.
Oh yes, the entire heating/cooling system is quite a beautiful bit of engineering. a very elegantly designed “supper manifold” and heat exchanges that can push or pull heat from any device to another in the vehicle. They don’t even have heating elements anymore, they just run the motor less efficiently to produce more heat!
Yeah, the old one heated the battery through similar tech as heated seats. I think the only problem with the tesla heat pump is that it doesn't function well below 20-30F. I'm not sure if that's all heat pumps.
> Most manufacturers offer a warranty somewhere in the range of 8 to 10 years, and 100,000 miles. That usually means that if your battery is below 70% health within either 8 years or 100,000 miles, they’ll replace it for you.
This disagrees with pretty much every other source I've been able to find. An N year/M mile warranty is good until whichever of N years or M miles you hit first.
> That usually means that if your battery is below 70% health within either 8 years or 100,000 miles, they’ll replace it for you.
Consider a car with 200k miles at 5 years. 5 years is within 8 years, so I don't see any way of reading "within either 8 years or 100k miles" that would not make that car covered. Similar for a car that is 15 years old with 50k miles.
But everything I've seen elsewhere says the warranty applies as long as you are within 8 years and within 100k miles.
My MG4 (Saic) has a five year warranty and rather a lot of small print, that I should probably OCR and pass through Chat for a summary and then read myself.
I do know it will last longer than my last car - a Ford Focus with an Eco boost abomination of an engine. The engine oil warning gauge thing decided to only kick in at just above the bottom level on the dipstick. Even so all should have been fine. I even drained and replaced the lot. This was a three year old car. It degraded over about a month and eventually passed away in Bristol. I live in Yeovil, a good hour away.
My first car was an elderly Mk1 Ford Fiesta (it was old in 1994). That often managed to run without any oil for some time because it had ended up as a rusty stain with the contents of the radiator on the underside of the bonnet (hood) and on the road.
I agree. and besides, that warranty is way too short. after 8 years, the car is unsellable with a 60% battery. And the used market is trending that way
It's stated directly in the article that Tesla's study reports vehicles with 200K miles generally retaining 85% capacity. That's nearly 300% better than what you're suggesting.
I think we (sorry I) have seen that degradation has not the concern, it's the pack engineering that is an issue by a large margin.
Tesla's packs first produced in 2017/18 for the model 3 represented largely the industry's first mass produced packs that will largely fail naturally, not due to pack engineering issues (failed cells, leaks, cooling, etc...). Before that required a much higher pack replacement rate, and other manufacturers have the same issues.
Also the early Nissan Leafs, pioneers in the mass-market EV space, had batteries with only air cooling and which experienced significant degradation.
More modern EVs with full liquid thermal management and newer cell revisions and chemistries seem to be holding up much better over time.
Some chemistries like LFP have even greater cycle and calendar life in return for a bit less energy density. Ford and GM are both betting big on these for their future entry-level EVs and I think they will end up being a common choice where maximum range isn't the customer's primary concern.
>Also the early Nissan Leafs, pioneers in the mass-market EV space, had batteries with only air cooling and which experienced significant degradation.
Don't forget that beside the chemistry issue in hot environments, the original Leaf only had a 24 kWh battery, so you'd have a lot more cycles than say a 60 kWh or 90 kWh battery. If you assume it is good for 1,000 equivalent charge cycles, and assume you 3.5 miles/kWh, than your 24 kWh battery would be good for 84,000 miles. A 60 kWh pack would be good for 210,000 miles, and a 90 kWh pack is good for 315,000 miles. A new Chevrolet Silverado EV has a 200 kWh pack (which, if you can squeeze out 2 miles/kWh, would be good for 400,000 miles).
And with a small battery it is more likely that you'd need to charge up to 100% and discharge closer to 0%, which is also harder on the battery.
>>Also the early Nissan Leafs, pioneers in the mass-market EV space, had batteries with only air cooling and which experienced significant degradation.
Volkswagen e-Ups, Seat Mii Electric and Skoda CitiGo EV(same car really), all have an air-cooled battery, been on the market for 13 years now and there's no significant degradation reported(not in a systematic way like with the Leafs). I think it's just different chemistry to what the Leafs were using.
> Ford and GM are both betting big on these for their future entry-level EVs and I think they will end up being a common choice where maximum range isn't the customer's primary concern.
A lot of people think they need way more range than they actually do, especially people that have decent charging at home. The think they need long range for the occasional long road trip but even there range is less important than they think it is. For long road trips charging speed is more important.
Briefly, consider a 3000 mile road trip. If your average highway speed is 75 mph that's 40 hours of driving. On top of that 40 hours you have whatever stoppage time there is to refuel/recharge. Let's put a lower bound on that.
Suppose you are in a car that can go 200 miles between stops. When you reach the first stop there are 2800 miles left, so over the course of all future stops on the trip you have to add a total of 2800 miles worth of fuel/charge. Let's say your car is an EV that can add 1000 miles in an hour of charging. That's 2.8 hours of total charging time for the trip.
Someone else in a 300 miles EV but that only adds 300 miles in an hour will first stop with 2700 miles left. They have to add 2700 miles of charge over the course of the trip, which takes 9 hours.
They will have fewer total stops (9) than the 200 mile range fast charging car (14) which favors the long range car because each stop has some overhead that is not spent actually charging but that is unlikely to be enough to make up for the slower charging car spending 6.2 more total hours actually charging.
Where the 300 mile slower charging car shines compared to the 200 mile fast charging car would be for people who have frequent trips like Los Angeles to San Diego and back. The 300 car could do that on one charge. The 200 mile car would would need a charge stop.
Similar for people who have trips like Los Angeles to Los Vegas where they will stay overnight. The 300 mile car could do that with about 10% to spare and then charge at your hotel. The 200 mile car would need a charge stop before reaching Vegas, then you should charge at the hotel, and then you will need one other on the way back. (If you charge to full on the first charge stop you can skip the one at the hotel but then the one on the way back will be longer, so you are better off taking the 3 charge approach that includes the hotel since that one can take place while you are busy losing your money in the casino).
You may be right. But we have a Model S 85D from 2015 and basically everything was replaced (seats, all door handles, ac compressor, sun roof, glove box, gauge cluster LCD, main LCD, MPU) except the battery. That's been great, and 10 years in tracking at 85% capacity.
That's just because they don't receive appropriate maintenance. In my family we had plenty of Italian and german cars, we maintained them, most hit 300k+ kilometers. Our 9000$ Lancia Y still worked fine after 350k+ and we only got rid of it because it cannot enter Rome due to emission restrictions.
Italian cars work great in the warm and dry Italian climate, but have historically had trouble with corrosion in colder climates that they were not built for. My dad loved Alfa Romeo’s, but none of them lasted very long in Denmark. In other words YMMV.
We had an Alfa Romeo and it did not enjoy -20°C. That model has almost completely disappeared from the market after 20 years, with the remaining ones usually being sold as projects or for parts.
I think they also had problems with timing belts? Google results are suggesting me that they had to halve the change interval, possibly because of our shitty roads. Volvo belts also last for 10 years in their native Sweden but only 5 years here.
Italian cars from the sixties through to the eighties were notorious for corrosion. It did mean you could buy something interesting for not very much money though. After the nineties they got a lot better.
I mean, you can get any car to last forever, it's just a question of being economically reasonable. My mum still has a 2004 Land Rover Discovery 3, one of the original ones with a 4.4L V8, and that car has a half a million kilometers(300k miles) on the clock now. Everything works, inside and out, I drove it at motorway speeds last month and it still felt super stable. And these cars have a terrible reputation for essentially ruining their owners and the electrical systems going haywire. The secret? My mum spending an equivalent of anywhere between 2000-5000 euro a year(!!!) on servicing and repairs to keep it in tip top shape. The car is probably worth only 5k, maybe 8k at a push. It doesn't make any logical sense, but it can be done.
Wow, I did not expect anyone to be offering a SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND mile warranty on their batteries. That's some serious confidence. I didn't see anything about it transferring, though. That would be smart on their end - the resale value for electric sports cars at least, is about 50% in the first year, then it levels off hard after that. This would encourage buying new, but not aftermarket. I'll have to look into this.
Still, while this removes a primary concern of mine, there's still one major hurdle that cannot be bypassed as far as I can tell (yet): If you have shared parking, there's essentially no way to charge your car. Maybe if it's an outdoor parking lot you can rely on solar power somewhat, assuming you're in a good situation for that?
Still, my point is that my parking space isn't actually mine, so I can't modify anything in the garage. Assuming superconductors aren't figured out any time soon, this appears to be an impossible solve, which cuts their consumer market significantly.
Also, not exactly the same thing, but they could remove those warranties and instead get some nice replaceable battery cells in there. Let me turn a thing to unlock it, pull out that one cell, and replace it. But maybe I'm a little more wrench-y than their customers want to be?
At my last apartment before I moved into a home where I did have the ability to install a charger, they had 4 EV chargering spots in the parking garage. I believe residents just had to pay the normal residential electricity rate to use them, they were standard commercial level 2 chargers like the kind you see in public parking lots.
All this to say, if the demand is there then shared parking structures will install them. I live in a city with a fairly high percentage of EVs, but it will continue to spread.
We get away with level 1 chargers, and live far from the city. Residential lots could easily get away with one level one charger per spot. (The wattage is < 25% that of one level 2 charger, so you can put in 4x as many with the same backend connection to the grid.)
For city commuters, this would probably be more than good enough.
There are some cars with panels, but they can only get about 10ish miles a day with good sunshine. Stationary panels work much, much better.
> Assuming superconductors aren't figured out any time soon, this appears to be an impossible solve, which cuts their consumer market significantly.
What does that have to do with EVs? The inflection point for adoption is solid state batteries, and there are some experimental factories under construction. (Solid state batteries don't loose charge when parked and can charge about as fast as filling a tank of gas.)
> Also, not exactly the same thing, but they could remove those warranties and instead get some nice replaceable battery cells in there.
Battery exchanges are impractical because the battery is part of the frame.
I don't think the bottleneck for charging is in the batteries, it's in electricity as an energy vector. By its very nature, someone is either instantaneously dispatching it from somewhere, or it's already being generated and curtailed. I just don't see that being cheaper than even biofuels in the long run, because time arbitrage matters. Making fuel with overcapacity that is worth zero (or less!) probably scales better than trying to store it all in batteries, because holes and containers will always be cheaper and easier to expand.
> If you have shared parking, there's essentially no way to charge your car.
The neighbourhood I used to live in London (where almost nobody has off-street parking) installed chargers into lamp posts. This BBC article has more details and photos https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67518869
Home charging in shared parking scenarios is difficult. Municipalities can add curbside chargers and in some places this is fairly common. In a private condo or apartment scenario you'd need the owner or association to agree to install them.
A second option is more slow chargers installed places your car spends a lot of time parked, like offices or transit stations if you park and ride.
A third option is using a fast charger somewhere you go once or twice a week. Like grocery stores, gyms, etc. Costco for example is adding fast chargers to their stores, which should be fast enough for a full charge by the time you actually get in and out of Costco.
Replacing cells in a pack can be difficult. You want all the cells in the pack to have roughly the same capacity and voltage curve, so that you can connect them all together and charge them at the same time.
GM says that their Ultium batteries are segmented into modules, which each module having its own Battery Management System, and that it supports mixing and matching modules of different degradation and even cell chemistry.
But anything that adds complexity to the pack beyond being cells packed in as densely as feasible is going to add costs and reduce maximum energy storage.
I think the long term answer here is that there will eventually be a used and remanufactured battery pack market for popular models, just like you can get a used or remanufactured engine today.
> A second option is more slow chargers installed places your car spends a lot of time parked, like offices or transit stations if you park and ride.
I don't think this will ever happen. It's the worst case in most every sense. You're talking thousands of chargers, for most parking structures, to solve a problem that's mostly about current battery tech/infrastructure. When battery tech is ready for general use, this won't be needed.
The housing and rental markets currently favour owners/landlords significantly and it's not looking like slowing down. I have zero hope that "charging infrastructure" will be installed to "attract tenants".
Here in Australia landlords seem to struggle with basic things like insulation or a split system aircon.
> Assuming superconductors aren't figured out any time soon, this appears to be an impossible solve, which cuts their consumer market significantly.
I don't think superconductors solve anything in the EV charging space, and certainly wouldn't make L2/L1 charging easier to install for shared parking / street-side parking. An L2 charger uses something like a electric clothes dryer circuit, with 240V at 40A. Or somewhere in the 6-10 kW range, to recharge you overnight.
Room temperature super conductors would be huge for the EV charging space. One big thing holding back EV transport trucks is charging capacity. The infrastructure to support charging a fleet of EV trucks at 1MW+ each is insane with current tech.
Even supporting a bank of 350KW chargers is pretty nuts like you see in some highway rest stops (or Tesla Supercharger stations). Locations are limited by the proximity to high voltage transmission lines right now (ie: it's really expensive to push that much current for any significant distance).
If we had cheap and ubiquitous super conductors that could be run like regular ole medium voltage electrical cables....game changer.
There is also just the situations where cars are parked on the street and the cabling has to get across the public pavement to charge the car. Even though those people can deploy a charger they can't be blocking the pavement. There is a real concern here where the incentives for the individual to pay to deploy charging capabilities in their car parking bay or front garden can't actually do so because of ownership. It needs solving via legislation, a basic default that people can pay to deploy these systems themselves.
Charging on public infrastructure ought to get there in time but the really big benefit of electric cars comes when it charges at home on cheap electricity and the only time you worry about charging it at all is when you do a long trip and you have to charge it at the half way point for 30 minutes.
I live in Portland OR where electric cars are fairly popular. People just run an extension cable out to the street and put a cable cover over it on the sidewalk.
Installation of AC Level 2 charging in garages is a technical problem but not exactly a problem on the level of “superconductors”. You need to install wiring and upgrade your service connection, and also install chargers that can share a circuit (which is commercially available.) It’s just a problem of figuring out who pays for it.
That's true of any car, not just EVs. The word in certain circles is that people are only buying the Ferrari Purosangue in hopes of getting on the waiting list for their more desirable cers.
And the Taycan is a great car in its own right, just the price is stupid. The Audi E-Tron is the same car just packaged differently and can be had for sometimes half the price.
Electric owners under-value the last 20% of their battery. That is the most important 20%
If you are running out of "gas" , every lost mile is a mile walking (or being towed). that last 20% of range is the difference between making it to the next charger or being dead on the road. And with electric it's a bigger burden because they can't be refilled with gasoline.
As a practical example, my recent charging forecast dropped from 12% to zero % during the drive (this was controlled for consumption, ambient temps, driving speed etc). We finally arrived with 3% on the battery. So that means in a year, we will not be able to make that exact same drive. That is a problem needing addressed.
I've also not heard great things with the warranties. It seems people struggle to redeem compensation via warranty. And the qualifying conditions are not helpful for most customers experiencing poor performance.
I'm happy with my electric car, but I don't think more of the market will adopt them until this issue is directly addressed. "only 20%" dismisses the most critical and insecure experiences with the car.
Whether it's the first or last 20% of the battery is a software problem: People adjust their driving habits to avoid running out of charge, in the same way that people adjust their driving habits to not run out of gas. A car losing power when it claims to still have 20% left is a big problem, because it's failing to present you with the information with which to base your plan. If the readout on my car simply said that it had 240 miles of range on a full charge instead of 300, there's a good chance I wouldn't even notice.
On the exceptionally rare instance that I'm driving more than 200 miles in a day, I appreciate the half an hour to stretch my legs and grab a snack while my car's on a fast charger.
Yeah, I had a model S for about 4 years and struggled with the bottom 20%. Everything becomes a stressful game of can I make it if the wind is too high. Part of this issue will be solved with more charging stations but the other part is degradation as you said.
I can relate. I've gotten pretty confident by watching the *consumption tab -- but i don't think most drivers should have to .
I think the ones who dismiss this issue drive regular routes with the EV and don't push the boundaries . Then there are the rest of us who actually try to test the limits where you encounter a good deal of unsettling unpredictability .
I've pulled supercharger data and found discrepancies between the before and after kwh delivered -- explaining some discrepancies in the charging and forecasts. I don't think anyone else has gone into that level of detail.
If the top of your charge level is the "last 20%", then you can have two or three or four or more "last 20%"s by buying a bigger battery.
I'd say the opposite, that you're losing the first 20% as your battery degrades, which is the least important part. And if you need a specific range for some trip, again just size your battery appropriately. Make sure 80% or 70% of the brand new range is enough for that trip.
Depending on the car brand you can drive several dozen kilometers even after hitting 0%.
Fully emptying an electric car is a boring exercise in stupidity. Unless you are going out of your way to do it, you will never run into a situation where you need to get your car towed.
That’s not true. I have documented a forecasting calibration issue specific to certain supercharging scenarios where the forecast drops 10% upon departure . The driver can follow the plan and still go below 0
"Electric owners under-value the last 20% of their battery. That is the most important 20%"
It's not exactly like an ICE. An ICE (in Europe) will put up a warning light at "I have roughly 50 miles left" you put your max speed at 50mph and find a garage. Job done.
I've owned quite a few of them over 30 years. I currently have a MG4 (Saic) Long Range and an elderly Renault Clio. The EV has a demonstrable range of at least 300 miles. UK temperatures. The Clio can do around 600 miles on a full tank.
I treat my EV in a similar way to my ICE. When it says it has 50 miles left, I look for petrol or sparks. That works here, now in the UK. It will work in quite a lot of Europe, some of the US, and will be laughable in most of Australia and Canada, most of Africa, ... anyway you get the idea.
They - ICE and EV are simply different. You have to learn to work with how they operate.
Oh and I pay £1.28 per litre and 7p per KWh (for overnight car charging). The petrol price is low at the moment for here (it hit £2+ when Russia went mental).
Quite loose numbers:
600 mi using 50 litres at £1.30 per litre is £65.
300 mi using 70 kWh at £0.07 per kWh is £4.90 say £5.
So, less than 20% cost in fuel (£65 vs £10) for an EV (here and now). I'm not too sure the Clio can really manage 600 miles nowadays but it is a good 15 years old!
The EV will need a new battery in around four years time, or I pass it on.
ICEs are around 150 years old. I went to school in Abingdon, where the Morris Garage (MG) operated from in about 1930(?/ish). My MG is a Chinese effort and about as British as I am. EVs are at about the stage that ICEs were when a bloke had to walk in front with a red flag.
> Oh and I pay £1.28 per litre and 7p per KWh (for overnight car charging). The petrol price is low at the moment for here (it hit £2+ when Russia went mental).
I (in the US, California) pay less for petrol than you and more for electricity; 87p/L and 23p/kWh overnight.
sure but here's an example from my mazda 3. after 17 years it exceeded it's rated range . the original full tank range was 337.5 miles. After 17 years i was getting 398.25 miles
With EVs you have a massive loss of utility over just a few years . Going from 337 miles to 320 miles in the first year is a huge loss. and down to 269mi after 10 years is catastrophic
Readit News
I looked into the secondhand EV market (in Norway). In doing so I read quite a bit of academic research to figure out the lifetime of an EV. Apparently the 80% capacity is the accepted end of life for an EV battery:
"For batteries, 80% of the initial capacity is referred to as the point after which it tends to exhibit an exponential decay of capacity and is considered an unreliable power source after this point for EV application" [1]
So, the Tesla the article talks about won't be much good, or at least not for very long.
[1]: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3271287
The rest of the car almost certainly doesn't have 200,000 more miles in it, so who cares?
People replace vehicles because they want and can afford replacement ones, not because they are mileage limited.
This what I find curious. It used to be cars were largely limited by their main driveline components. Now those components have been simplified. In a lot of the BYD cars it is literally the exact same driveline so for them it is almost commoditised.
My part of the world sees no snow or salt. So if the body is fine and the driveline is fine....
Why can't I run a car for a million miles and simply replace coils, struts, hubs, bearings, carpets, seats, the-tiny-electric-motors-that-drive-windows-and-seats-and-mirrors etc?
IE where is the electric version of the old landcruiser series?
The paper that underpins the 80% claim is paywalled and I'm cheap so don't have the numbers to hand. But in the abstract sense being statistical could go the other way too - i.e. some might get to 90% before they start their exponential decay.
> And "exponential degrade" doesn't mean it's particularly fast.
True, exponential doesn't mean much other than e^n where it's implied that n > 1. However the value of n does matter, for example a decay rate for n=100 is quite different than n=1.1. Again, we're talking in general terms as I don't have the value of n for this. For better or worse, I'm taking the paper at face value when it talks of end of life at 80% - however it has been peer reviewed and is in a "proper" journal so to my mind that adds some credibility.
It's worth mentioning that the current DoE guidance on lifetimes is: "12 to 15 years in moderate climates (8 to 12 years in extreme climates)". Of course that guidance is also based on a statistical analysis that doesn't seem to account for modern battery management systems [1]. There are additional factors at play that govern battery degradation, including things like: battery chemistry, environment, EV charging habits, etc.
Ultimately the real test of EV battery life will come with time. It'll manifest as the change in average age of scrapped vehicles with large fleets of EV's on the road. In Norway right now it's about 18 years (for a mostly internal combustion fleet) [2]. However as of this year all private vehicles sold must be zero-emission - so in 10-20 years we'll have some interesting data [3].
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250530000446/https://afdc.ener...
[2]: https://www.ssb.no/en/statbank/table/05522/tableViewLayout1/...
[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250530115356/https://www.regje...
The publication cites sources from 15 years ago for this "fact" [0]. That's ancient history in the context of EVs (even before the first reliable mass production EV - Tesla's Model S - was initially released). As a practical matter, the article points out that most EV manufacturers (Tesla included) warranty their batteries for at least 70% capacity at timespans near a decade, which would bankrupt them all if EV batteries just up and died at 80%.
0) [35] O. Erdinc, B. Vural, and M. Uzunoglu, ‘‘A dynamic lithium-ion battery model considering the effects of temperature and capacity fading,’’ in Proc. Int. Conf. Clean Electr. Power, Jun. 2009, pp. 383–386.
[36] K. Smith, T. Markel, G.-H. Kim, and A. Pesaran, ‘‘Design of electric drive vehicle batteries for long life and low cost,’’ in Proc. Accelerated Stress Test. Rel. (ASTR), IEE Workshop, 2010, pp. 6–8.
To the practical matter - yes, EV manufacturers are very careful with warranty periods. Anecdotally, an acquaintance had a Tesla for 8 years. 6 months after the 8-year battery warranty expired the battery ceased working. The details were a little unclear (it was explained in broken English/Norwegian). That said, anecdata carries little weight. What we need is more peer-reviewed research to update our understanding of battery longevity. Until we have that we need to rely on the existing published knowledge... otherwise anyone can assert anything and we learn nothing.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250530000446/https://afdc.ener...
In other words, if a battery is new and has 200 miles range, but is driven 100 miles a day, it will stay between 20-80% charge each day when charging.
but at 80% capacity, 160 miles range, it must be either charged above 80% or discharged below 20% each day which is unhealthy for the battery. (either 80%->17% or 83%->20%)
as soon as it starts getting out of healthy range I can see how it can degrade faster.
But cars that stay in that range will have a much longer lifespan.
I think modern EVs are set up to charge to a certain percentage of capacity rather than a specific range, kind of like how smartphones do it.
Your point about depth of discharge ( 80%->17% ) makes sense though, since the battery system can't really control someone's driving routine.
Why guess? This is data that is almost certainly aggregated back to the manufacturer and could be available as a published report. The fact you don't see this report I think is indicative of the reality.
> Pessimism about battery longevity is giving us all cheaper second-hand EVs
The seller sets the price. Not the buyer. You should ask why the seller is willing to let the vehicle go for a lower than expected price for a given number of miles.
> had lost just 15% of their capacity, on average
There are no average batteries. The used vehicle market doesn't work on averages, it generally works on worst cases, particularly in an as-is (no warranty) sale.
> in other words, there was no active cooling of the battery
As it requires a four way valve. That's a common failure point in EVs.
> Many manufacturers provide long warranties for their batteries
Do those often persist through private party sales?
I'm not trying to be mean, I think EVs are great, but hybrids are still obviously better, and the market is far more complex than this author would like to acknowledge. I dislike articles that start with a conclusion and then spend pages trying to justify it. The data to actually answer this question was available but completely unused here. I did not find this convincing or informative.
Think of it this way. There is a segment of the buying market that is hostile to these vehicles by default. Waving your hands with no data to back it up only makes it worse.
Anyways..
With an ICE, I get gas once a week or so. With an EV, I plug my car in overnight a couple times a week, maybe using a fast charger once a month or so when I realize I've neglected to do before a longer trip. With a hybrid, I'm plugging in every night, plus getting gas once a month or so.
With a (manual transmission) ICE, I get to decide my power curve, and know if I slam the peddle to the metal, I can get a LOT of power out of that car. With an ICE, my acceleration is limited mostly by software. With a hybrid, if your EV mode battery gets depleted, the car gets sluggish. Plus, you're dragging around a bunch of dead weight in the form of a battery, so you don't even get respectable acceleration on ICE standards.
On top of all that, hybrids cost more (because they have basically all the parts of an ICE and an EV).
With non-plug-in hybrids, you don't plug them in at night, and you're lugging a lot less battery around. In some sense, you do have all the complications of both, but as an example, the whole planetary gearset, dual motor setup in Toyota's Synergy drive replaces a traditional gearbox and seems to be more reliable and more efficient. I also expected Priuses to have worse reliability than non-hybrid Toyotas, and seem to have been completely wrong.
Also, while what I wrote above probably makes it sounds like I'm against plug-in hybrids, I think of them as a way to reduce the weight of a full electric car, by replacing a lot of the battery weight with a traditional ICE drivetrain, i.e. a range extender/light-weight source of power for acceleration.
I also don't like the weight and complication of modern cars. It's really hard to beat ICE for weight, but seems to be pretty easy to beat it for acceleration and fuel economy at the cost of making it more complicated (and worse handling).
I read a review of the BMW 330e iPerformance once, which messed with my head. They made the point that BMW had basically found a way to make a car heavier, without hurting acceleration or fuel economy (and also not really improving either).
FYI: I am just interested in this area, and have spent way too much time thinking about it. Many people will be more knowledgeable in this space. I just wanted to throw out some ideas to be shot down :)
Edit: Forgot to comment on your Integra - probably nothing modern will rival that for a long time! I was crushed giving up my '94 Celica a couple of years ago when I moved overseas. Basically gave it away!
The seller sets the asking price; the buyer sets the bid price; and mutual agreement between the buyer and the seller sets the selling price. When sellers set an asking price, they tend to refer to information about previous selling prices, creating a dynamic where buyers influence asking prices.
>Do those often persist through private party sales?
Yes: "Your New Vehicle Limited Warranty will follow your vehicle and be transferred to the new owner when a vehicle ownership transfer is performed through Tesla." (https://www.tesla.com/support/vehicle-warranty) You opened your comment with "Why guess?", so I wonder why you posed this as a question (in such a way as to hint that the answer is "no") when the correct answer was a Google search away.
I've replaced more transmissions and rebuilt more engines than most people you'll meet. The EV drivetrain, even if it has a weak point in the battery, it's such a pleasure to own because of the reduced maintenance. All the money saved on oil, oil filters, plugs, mufflers, replacement stolen catalytic converters, coils, plug wires, fire and air filters, valve gaskets, water pumps, timing chains, lifters, brake pads, and the damned automatic transmission, add up to about the same order as a battery replacement - if that battery replacement is even needed. In the ICE vehicle, all those things are definitely needed.
Like a lot of anti-EV commentary^, there's nuance being missed and that is: use case. There is no "X is obviously better" (this is also true for a lot more topics than this)
I have a Nissan Leaf that's perfect for the purposes we bought it, better than a hybrid, far better than a petrol or diesel car. There are also scenarios where a hybrid is better, and there are also scenarios where a great big diesel burning engine is the best option. These gaps are closing though.
^I've had frustrating conversations with relatives when discussing the possibility of buying an EV where they just round-trip through a list of negatives, and I have to explain repeatedly that they don't apply to our use case. Examples:
- Can't tow: I haven't towed anything with any of our ICE cars in years (and we still have the ICE cars anyway)
- Can't take it interstate: We're not planning to take it interstate, and we're not planning on buying one big enough to carry what we'd need for an interstate trip anyway.
- Wouldn't a hybrid be better / safer first option to dip into electric: Not for our very regular and frequent short trips, pure electric is simpler and cheaper, and I've done the research to be confident in the decision.
- Miscellaneous other: We're not actually getting rid of the existing cars (yet) so we're not losing anything you might be worried about us losing.
The Leaf is on track to have saved us nearly $2k in petrol for the year (even taking into account the cost of electricity to charge her). If she lasts another four years she'll have paid for herself.
Many families where I am have two cars. Both cars spend an inordinate amount of time driving around the city. One car will be the preferred long distance family hauler.
Simply making the other car full electric seems like a no brainer to me.
Manufacturers DO publish reports. Tesla routinely provides data about the lifetimes of their vehicle batteries, which turn out to greatly exceed their warranties. (This shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Manufacturers just can't afford to have high warranty return rates).
The rest of your post is an attempt at hand-waving away what is a real phenomenon. EVs are still new to a lot of people, there's a lot of FUD floating around, and that can affect used vehicle prices. Markets behave irrationally sometimes, and that leads to opportunity. (In this case, getting a value buy on a used EV).
> hybrids are still obviously better
Hybrids are objectively worse. They have less all-electric (efficient, non-polluting) range, they charge more slowly, they have a more complex drivetrain with more parts subject to repair, etc. They're a better fit for a specific market segment, but that segment is small and rapidly becoming non-existent. You can get cheap EVs nowadays that have more range than my last ICE.
Disagree. People vastly overestimate the complexity of hybrids.
The mechanical and electrical components in a Toyota-style planetary gear based hybrid are much simpler than a standard automatic transmission, and demonstrably more reliable than both a conventional automatic and belt-style CVT.
This is a long way of saying, the specific market segment hybrids are a good fit for is the set of all passenger car customers that an EV is _not_ a good fit for. Anyone buying a Corolla, Civic Rav4 or CR-V should be buying the hybrid, and sales seem to be trending that way.
They were caught lying many times.
Battery was at 87% of capacity.
The big problem was cold snaps. It had the older heating system and would lose a lot of charge in the cold. Our 2022 Model Y with the newer heating system doesn't lose nearly as much charge in cold snaps.
This disagrees with pretty much every other source I've been able to find. An N year/M mile warranty is good until whichever of N years or M miles you hit first.
> That usually means that if your battery is below 70% health within either 8 years or 100,000 miles, they’ll replace it for you.
Consider a car with 200k miles at 5 years. 5 years is within 8 years, so I don't see any way of reading "within either 8 years or 100k miles" that would not make that car covered. Similar for a car that is 15 years old with 50k miles.
But everything I've seen elsewhere says the warranty applies as long as you are within 8 years and within 100k miles.
My MG4 (Saic) has a five year warranty and rather a lot of small print, that I should probably OCR and pass through Chat for a summary and then read myself.
I do know it will last longer than my last car - a Ford Focus with an Eco boost abomination of an engine. The engine oil warning gauge thing decided to only kick in at just above the bottom level on the dipstick. Even so all should have been fine. I even drained and replaced the lot. This was a three year old car. It degraded over about a month and eventually passed away in Bristol. I live in Yeovil, a good hour away.
My first car was an elderly Mk1 Ford Fiesta (it was old in 1994). That often managed to run without any oil for some time because it had ended up as a rusty stain with the contents of the radiator on the underside of the bonnet (hood) and on the road.
Tesla's packs first produced in 2017/18 for the model 3 represented largely the industry's first mass produced packs that will largely fail naturally, not due to pack engineering issues (failed cells, leaks, cooling, etc...). Before that required a much higher pack replacement rate, and other manufacturers have the same issues.
More modern EVs with full liquid thermal management and newer cell revisions and chemistries seem to be holding up much better over time.
Some chemistries like LFP have even greater cycle and calendar life in return for a bit less energy density. Ford and GM are both betting big on these for their future entry-level EVs and I think they will end up being a common choice where maximum range isn't the customer's primary concern.
Don't forget that beside the chemistry issue in hot environments, the original Leaf only had a 24 kWh battery, so you'd have a lot more cycles than say a 60 kWh or 90 kWh battery. If you assume it is good for 1,000 equivalent charge cycles, and assume you 3.5 miles/kWh, than your 24 kWh battery would be good for 84,000 miles. A 60 kWh pack would be good for 210,000 miles, and a 90 kWh pack is good for 315,000 miles. A new Chevrolet Silverado EV has a 200 kWh pack (which, if you can squeeze out 2 miles/kWh, would be good for 400,000 miles).
And with a small battery it is more likely that you'd need to charge up to 100% and discharge closer to 0%, which is also harder on the battery.
Volkswagen e-Ups, Seat Mii Electric and Skoda CitiGo EV(same car really), all have an air-cooled battery, been on the market for 13 years now and there's no significant degradation reported(not in a systematic way like with the Leafs). I think it's just different chemistry to what the Leafs were using.
A lot of people think they need way more range than they actually do, especially people that have decent charging at home. The think they need long range for the occasional long road trip but even there range is less important than they think it is. For long road trips charging speed is more important.
Briefly, consider a 3000 mile road trip. If your average highway speed is 75 mph that's 40 hours of driving. On top of that 40 hours you have whatever stoppage time there is to refuel/recharge. Let's put a lower bound on that.
Suppose you are in a car that can go 200 miles between stops. When you reach the first stop there are 2800 miles left, so over the course of all future stops on the trip you have to add a total of 2800 miles worth of fuel/charge. Let's say your car is an EV that can add 1000 miles in an hour of charging. That's 2.8 hours of total charging time for the trip.
Someone else in a 300 miles EV but that only adds 300 miles in an hour will first stop with 2700 miles left. They have to add 2700 miles of charge over the course of the trip, which takes 9 hours.
They will have fewer total stops (9) than the 200 mile range fast charging car (14) which favors the long range car because each stop has some overhead that is not spent actually charging but that is unlikely to be enough to make up for the slower charging car spending 6.2 more total hours actually charging.
Where the 300 mile slower charging car shines compared to the 200 mile fast charging car would be for people who have frequent trips like Los Angeles to San Diego and back. The 300 car could do that on one charge. The 200 mile car would would need a charge stop.
Similar for people who have trips like Los Angeles to Los Vegas where they will stay overnight. The 300 mile car could do that with about 10% to spare and then charge at your hotel. The 200 mile car would need a charge stop before reaching Vegas, then you should charge at the hotel, and then you will need one other on the way back. (If you charge to full on the first charge stop you can skip the one at the hotel but then the one on the way back will be longer, so you are better off taking the 3 charge approach that includes the hotel since that one can take place while you are busy losing your money in the casino).
I never understood why they carried on with that for so long when they had a better system in their vans which they could have dropped right in.
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It had the trifecta of short range, slow charging, and nasty degradation that all feed into the negative perceptions of EVs.
Dead Comment
That's just because they don't receive appropriate maintenance. In my family we had plenty of Italian and german cars, we maintained them, most hit 300k+ kilometers. Our 9000$ Lancia Y still worked fine after 350k+ and we only got rid of it because it cannot enter Rome due to emission restrictions.
I think they also had problems with timing belts? Google results are suggesting me that they had to halve the change interval, possibly because of our shitty roads. Volvo belts also last for 10 years in their native Sweden but only 5 years here.
Still, while this removes a primary concern of mine, there's still one major hurdle that cannot be bypassed as far as I can tell (yet): If you have shared parking, there's essentially no way to charge your car. Maybe if it's an outdoor parking lot you can rely on solar power somewhat, assuming you're in a good situation for that?
Still, my point is that my parking space isn't actually mine, so I can't modify anything in the garage. Assuming superconductors aren't figured out any time soon, this appears to be an impossible solve, which cuts their consumer market significantly.
Also, not exactly the same thing, but they could remove those warranties and instead get some nice replaceable battery cells in there. Let me turn a thing to unlock it, pull out that one cell, and replace it. But maybe I'm a little more wrench-y than their customers want to be?
All this to say, if the demand is there then shared parking structures will install them. I live in a city with a fairly high percentage of EVs, but it will continue to spread.
For city commuters, this would probably be more than good enough.
> Assuming superconductors aren't figured out any time soon, this appears to be an impossible solve, which cuts their consumer market significantly.
What does that have to do with EVs? The inflection point for adoption is solid state batteries, and there are some experimental factories under construction. (Solid state batteries don't loose charge when parked and can charge about as fast as filling a tank of gas.)
> Also, not exactly the same thing, but they could remove those warranties and instead get some nice replaceable battery cells in there.
Battery exchanges are impractical because the battery is part of the frame.
citation needed. /s
Never heard of batteries without self-discharge.
The neighbourhood I used to live in London (where almost nobody has off-street parking) installed chargers into lamp posts. This BBC article has more details and photos https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67518869
A second option is more slow chargers installed places your car spends a lot of time parked, like offices or transit stations if you park and ride.
A third option is using a fast charger somewhere you go once or twice a week. Like grocery stores, gyms, etc. Costco for example is adding fast chargers to their stores, which should be fast enough for a full charge by the time you actually get in and out of Costco.
Replacing cells in a pack can be difficult. You want all the cells in the pack to have roughly the same capacity and voltage curve, so that you can connect them all together and charge them at the same time.
GM says that their Ultium batteries are segmented into modules, which each module having its own Battery Management System, and that it supports mixing and matching modules of different degradation and even cell chemistry.
But anything that adds complexity to the pack beyond being cells packed in as densely as feasible is going to add costs and reduce maximum energy storage.
I think the long term answer here is that there will eventually be a used and remanufactured battery pack market for popular models, just like you can get a used or remanufactured engine today.
I don't think this will ever happen. It's the worst case in most every sense. You're talking thousands of chargers, for most parking structures, to solve a problem that's mostly about current battery tech/infrastructure. When battery tech is ready for general use, this won't be needed.
Presumably over time shared parking areas will get upgraded with charging infrastructure to keep attracting tenants.
Here in Australia landlords seem to struggle with basic things like insulation or a split system aircon.
I don't think superconductors solve anything in the EV charging space, and certainly wouldn't make L2/L1 charging easier to install for shared parking / street-side parking. An L2 charger uses something like a electric clothes dryer circuit, with 240V at 40A. Or somewhere in the 6-10 kW range, to recharge you overnight.
Even supporting a bank of 350KW chargers is pretty nuts like you see in some highway rest stops (or Tesla Supercharger stations). Locations are limited by the proximity to high voltage transmission lines right now (ie: it's really expensive to push that much current for any significant distance).
If we had cheap and ubiquitous super conductors that could be run like regular ole medium voltage electrical cables....game changer.
Charging on public infrastructure ought to get there in time but the really big benefit of electric cars comes when it charges at home on cheap electricity and the only time you worry about charging it at all is when you do a long trip and you have to charge it at the half way point for 30 minutes.
And the Taycan is a great car in its own right, just the price is stupid. The Audi E-Tron is the same car just packaged differently and can be had for sometimes half the price.
Dead Comment
If you are running out of "gas" , every lost mile is a mile walking (or being towed). that last 20% of range is the difference between making it to the next charger or being dead on the road. And with electric it's a bigger burden because they can't be refilled with gasoline.
As a practical example, my recent charging forecast dropped from 12% to zero % during the drive (this was controlled for consumption, ambient temps, driving speed etc). We finally arrived with 3% on the battery. So that means in a year, we will not be able to make that exact same drive. That is a problem needing addressed.
I've also not heard great things with the warranties. It seems people struggle to redeem compensation via warranty. And the qualifying conditions are not helpful for most customers experiencing poor performance.
I'm happy with my electric car, but I don't think more of the market will adopt them until this issue is directly addressed. "only 20%" dismisses the most critical and insecure experiences with the car.
On the exceptionally rare instance that I'm driving more than 200 miles in a day, I appreciate the half an hour to stretch my legs and grab a snack while my car's on a fast charger.
You're right for many drivers with dense charger coverage it's a nuisance.
But there are drivers who take trips with sparse charger coverage , where the 20% loss means insecure or impossible trips.
I think the ones who dismiss this issue drive regular routes with the EV and don't push the boundaries . Then there are the rest of us who actually try to test the limits where you encounter a good deal of unsettling unpredictability .
I've pulled supercharger data and found discrepancies between the before and after kwh delivered -- explaining some discrepancies in the charging and forecasts. I don't think anyone else has gone into that level of detail.
I'd say the opposite, that you're losing the first 20% as your battery degrades, which is the least important part. And if you need a specific range for some trip, again just size your battery appropriately. Make sure 80% or 70% of the brand new range is enough for that trip.
Fully emptying an electric car is a boring exercise in stupidity. Unless you are going out of your way to do it, you will never run into a situation where you need to get your car towed.
It's not exactly like an ICE. An ICE (in Europe) will put up a warning light at "I have roughly 50 miles left" you put your max speed at 50mph and find a garage. Job done.
I've owned quite a few of them over 30 years. I currently have a MG4 (Saic) Long Range and an elderly Renault Clio. The EV has a demonstrable range of at least 300 miles. UK temperatures. The Clio can do around 600 miles on a full tank.
I treat my EV in a similar way to my ICE. When it says it has 50 miles left, I look for petrol or sparks. That works here, now in the UK. It will work in quite a lot of Europe, some of the US, and will be laughable in most of Australia and Canada, most of Africa, ... anyway you get the idea.
They - ICE and EV are simply different. You have to learn to work with how they operate.
Oh and I pay £1.28 per litre and 7p per KWh (for overnight car charging). The petrol price is low at the moment for here (it hit £2+ when Russia went mental).
Quite loose numbers:
600 mi using 50 litres at £1.30 per litre is £65. 300 mi using 70 kWh at £0.07 per kWh is £4.90 say £5.
So, less than 20% cost in fuel (£65 vs £10) for an EV (here and now). I'm not too sure the Clio can really manage 600 miles nowadays but it is a good 15 years old!
If I have to use a motorway/commercial charger then the cost is around £0.50 to £0.80 per kWh (https://www.gridserve.com/electric-vehicle-charging/our-pric...) I don't use them very often
The EV will need a new battery in around four years time, or I pass it on.
ICEs are around 150 years old. I went to school in Abingdon, where the Morris Garage (MG) operated from in about 1930(?/ish). My MG is a Chinese effort and about as British as I am. EVs are at about the stage that ICEs were when a bloke had to walk in front with a red flag.
I (in the US, California) pay less for petrol than you and more for electricity; 87p/L and 23p/kWh overnight.
With EVs you have a massive loss of utility over just a few years . Going from 337 miles to 320 miles in the first year is a huge loss. and down to 269mi after 10 years is catastrophic