Technology @beehaw.org along_the_road @beehaw.org 3 days ago

Electric Cars Could Last Much Longer Than You Think - Rather than having a shorter lifespan than internal combustion engines, EV batteries are lasting way longer than expected

www.wired.com Electric Cars Could Last Much Longer Than You Think

Rather than having a shorter lifespan than internal combustion engines, EV batteries are lasting way longer than expected, surprising even the automakers themselves.

21 comments

Once EVs become the main type of vehicles sold, sellers will lower quality to 'encourage' you to replace them more often.

Every industry starts off like this and ends off like that.
- Its muuch easier to start an EV company than a combustion one tho. Also modding of old cars into EVs is a thing. It will happen but not as extreme as with combustion ones i think. Especially because chinese ones tend to be less enshittified.
  
  The Chinese ones tend to be less enshittified? Having just recently about how Xiaomi cars disable software updates if you change the headlights, allow me to doubt that.
  
  less about easy to start an EV company (honestly you can buy engines, so that’s not really the hard part; manufacturing is, as tesla found out the hard way) and more about it being easy to build an EV from almost nothing… you can ram batteries and electric motors into almost any body as you pointed out, so if a company makes junk it’s pretty easy to replace bits with whatever you like, and since electrons are electrons are electrons, your battery, motors, etc only have to kind of match
From the aricle: "If this 1.8 percent annual degradation continued in a linear fashion, after 10 years an EV would still have 82 percent of its battery capacity, much more than the 70 percent most batteries are warrantied for after eight years."

The battery degradation isn't linear. If the auto makers would themselves believe this, they'd give longer warranties, to encourage sales.
- A 1.8%pa degradation over 10 years would be, 83.39%.
  
  Linearising it to make it "more intuitive" I guess.
  
  But 2%pa degradation gets you very close to the 18% over 10 years figure. 1.9649% to be more precise.
  
  Over 20 years you are down to ~67% and ~55% at 30 years.
  
  And upcoming EPA regs will require the 80%, 10 year claim. I think that starts for MY28? Not 100% confident on the timing
Who'd have thought not having explosions going off inside the car constantly would cause less wear and tear
I'm not surprised at all.

Almost all automakers are offering a 8 years warranty on the battery. That means who made the battery (=the one that would ultimately pay the bill if it lasts less than 8 years) is expecting an average of 15 years or more

Can you say the same for a normal engine? After 8 years it will start to give lots of problems. Oil leaking, compression problems, dirty injectors, and so on
- 8 years on an internal combustion engine is nothing if you preventative maintenance properly.
  
  My newest car is 18 years old and the only thing wrong at the moment is the seals around 2 of the windows is finally leaking. All the work I've done is preventative maintenance and it's got about 180k miles on it. The previous owner did the same. I put about 20k miles a year on it since I bought it.
  
  My other car is 25 years old and it's basically the same story except it's passing 200k miles soon, and I'm the 4th owner. And the previous owners neglected the hell out of the poor thing. I've only put about 15k miles on this one.
  
  I'm going to drive them until I can't fix them.
  
  While that is true for some cars, not all cars, EV or ICE, are built equally. One of my previous cars got all the preventative maintainance, but it still started to break down constantly at 120k miles (Saab 9-5 if you're curious). The issue is that while we have a lot of reliability data for ICE cars, there isn't much for EVs. Ideally they would have higher reliability since they are relatively more simple, but at this point we do not have long term data.
  
  Also, and this is an article problem, not a you problem, years owned is not as helpful as miles driven. Even in EVs, the slight degradation you see YoY could be amplified by driving 50k miles in a year.
  
  8 years on an internal combustion engine is nothing if you preventative maintenance properly.
  
  Also depends on the type and amount of driving you do.
- What's the 8->15 year math?
  
  Probably something to do with the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) based on that you can calculate how long your stuff lasts and how you should schedule repairs, or in that case, how long you can provide warranty. I'd be intetested in the numbers for the jump from 8 -> 15, too
  
  Trust me bro MTBF maffs.

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