EV Batteries Are Dangerous to Repair. Here’s Why Mechanics Are Doing So Anyway
EV Batteries Are Dangerous to Repair. Here’s Why Mechanics Are Doing So Anyway
Fixing car and e-bike batteries saves money and resources, but challenges are holding back the industry
Fixing car and e-bike batteries saves money and resources, but challenges are holding back the industry
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I swear, most people on lemmy have their heads shoved so far up their asses about how everyone should get full electric vehicles and that they're great and have lower maintenance costs just down vote me to hell when I bring anything like this up. I know the tech and I work on vehicles and batteries. It's dumb to buy a $60,000 vehicle with a 1,200 lb battery that could barely be removed to replace and expensive as hell. The resale value when the battery is about shot is next to nothing, and the "great 8 year 100,000 mile minimum legally required battery warranty" just requires the battery to still work to 70% capacity. Imagine buying a vehicle that is supposed to go 300 miles on a charge, but only goes 230 miles during winter going down to only going 150 miles during winter after 100,000 miles and still not being a warranty issue. My prius started at around 45 mpg, has 240,000 miles on it, and still gets....45 mpg. Hybrid batteries are small enough and cheap enough to be easily replaceable. It crapped out after being about 13 years old and I replaced it myself in an afternoon. It only weighs 75 pounds. No one should buy and keep an EV beyond 10 years old or you risk "being the bag holder" that's stuck with a 4,500 pound paper weight.
You should see what happens to actual mpg in the rain vs in the dry. Its almost like MPG can vary wildly dependent on environment and situation
Yeah the whole range issue is dumb to me. You can recharge it so what's the issue? I recharge mine on long trips and stop to eat at the same time. Who are all these people that want to sit in a car for over 400 miles without stopping? That sounds worse lol I always stopped with my case car to eat or pee anyways. If I stay 30 min to an hour I can get fully charged too.
Also the benefits of never needing to stop to charge or fuel when I'm just driving around town. I can go all over and not need to charge my car for a few days. Then I do it when I sleep.
Also single pedal driving was new to me and I love that! It is so much more responsive if I want to stop I just stop going lol I love it. It has crazy torque too and makes a fun spaceship sound when I drive around.
Depends on where you live and where you plan to go with it. Our EV at current range is fine to get to the nearby large city in the summer over a fairly long stretch of highway. In winter it would probably be doable but at the least it impact our stopping/charging schedule. At 70% range it might not be doable at all in winter and we'd have to be careful in summer. Governments pushing EVs absolutely should be pushing a reasonable recycle/replacement cycle for batteries and the infrastructure to support that.
You misunderstand me. I'm saying that unlike ice vehicles that will continue to get about the same mpg for the life of the vehicle, lithium batteries degrade with every charge/discharge cycle. When an electric is new and you buy one with enough range to suit your needs, every year you own it the max range on a full charge is reduced. So an ev with 120,000 miles on it that started off being able to go 300 miles max will now only go about 250 miles max. The batteries lose capacity. The federally required 8 year 100k mile warranty on batteries only covers if the capacity of the battery is less than 70% of the original capacity. Typically though, evs are usually in the range of 80 to 90% capacity at the 100k point. They don't start dropping off hard until they're closer to around 200k and over 10 years old most of the time. Total failure due to dead shorts in too many cells has been happening around the 14 to 18 year area. That's when you decide to sell it for $3,000 or pay $15,000 to install another battery.
Total failure due to dead shorts in too many cells has been happening around the 14 to 18 year area. That’s when you decide to sell it for $3,000 or pay $15,000 to install another battery.
If I get to 14 to 18 years on a car without every having to replace an engine, transmission, it never gets in a crash that writes it off entirely, and its still worth $3k at the end I consider that a win.
My old Volvo is 43 years old and has never had engine or transmission changed. It’s gone for 350,000 km and is still going strong. Is probably worth somewhere in the region of $2k. I don’t see any of the cars made today managing the same feat.
That's straight up survivorship bias
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data. > Survivorship bias is a form of selection bias that can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because multiple failures are overlooked, such as when companies that no longer exist are excluded from analyses of financial performance. It can also lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than just coincidence as in correlation "proves" causality.> Another kind of survivorship bias would involve thinking that an incident happened in a particular way because the only people who were involved in the incident who can speak about it are those who survived it. Even if one knew that some people are dead, they would not have their voice to add to the conversation, making it biased.
Sure, except 25% of all vehicles in the US are over 16 years old, and most that aren't is due to accidents.
and most that aren’t is due to accidents.
You're making my point for me. The likelihood a car, any car BEV or not, is going to make it to your (unproven) theoretical point of being a problem is 1 in 4.
If your premise is that BEVs are good up until the 200k mark, then you're making a bad bet on your ICE or Hybrid needing to survive to the 200k mark to be worth it. With your numbers I have a 75% chance of being right, while you only have a 25% chance, and that's even if I agree with your premise (which I think is a bit suspect).
When you wreck a vehicle your insurance gives you enough money to buy a similar replacement vehicle. So if you crash your ten year old EV and become part of the 75%, you have the option of either spending thousands more to buy a newer one, or getting another 10 year old EV. That's how the numbers drop with age and you still end up with an EV that's on the verge of going tits up.
Right now the price of older EVs is higher than it should be. It's because people are uneducated and naive about the batteries and how assuredly a well built one will still fail and pretty soon the general population will wise up to it and old ev prices will dive.
There is no getting lucky with an electric car battery beyond it not having any large defects in any of the cells, because every ev battery has so many cells in it there's no "getting one that was built just right". The only thing you can do to help is keeping the battery between 30 and 80% charged at all times and not using level 3 or faster chargers on it, and keeping it garaged and not living in a place with extreme heat. That's going to be the the factors that will make the battery last closer to 20 years than 12 years. That also cuts way into your range and where you can go, of course.
It’s because people are uneducated and naive about the batteries and how assuredly a well built one will still fail and pretty soon the general population will wise up to it and old ev prices will dive.
Gotcha, so we've exited the discussion on proven fact and you're well into your personal speculation. Thanks for the discussion up to now. Have a great day!
But what does that number even mean? There are also 278 million vehicles registered in the US and only 233 million registered drivers, so I'm betting a lot of those 16+ year old vehicles aren't people's primary mode of transportation. I spend 2-3 hours commuting on the freeway and certainly don't see 1 in 4 being 16+ years old. My own car is 10 years old now and I would say it's on the older side of what I typically see.
I swear, everyone on Lemmy have their heads shoved so far up their asses about how everyone should go full internal combustion and that they're great and have lower maintenance costs just down vote me to hell when I bring anything like this up. I know the tech and work on vehicles and combustion engines. It's dumb to buy a $40,000 vehicle with a 300 pound engine, 200 pound transmission, mechanically complex 4 wheel drive system with upwards of 3 independently locking differentials. The resale value when the head gaskets is blown is next to nothing, and the great 5 year 60,000 mile power train warranty doesn't even cover the average mileage people drive in 8 years. It only requires you mosty pay off the average loan length for a new vehicle. My Tesla costs 13 cents to drive about 4 miles, where the equivalent combustion car, with 400 horsepower and 400 foot pounds of torque, costs upwards of a dollar to drive the same. The high strung powerplants in performance cars require regular, expensive, maintenance, and if you actually push them will blow up in under 10,000 miles. An LS3 crate motor costs more than the car is worth and that doesn't even include the transmission or any of the other drivetrain components. No one should buy and keep a combustion engine for more than 10 years or you risk "being the bag holder" and stuck with a cancer emitting 4,000 pound paperweight.
I mean, I'm all for EV, but my car is over fifteen years old and still cranks every single time. Gets almost 40 to the gallon. Yeah, the resale is shit, but if I drive it until the wheels fall off, I don't have to worry about that.
Their argument was valid other than their martyr complex
It really isn't.
The whole point of the crate motor vs battery pack was it's ridiculous to compare the cost of a new battery vs a used engine. If you blow an engine in a regular car it's replaced with s used one, even if it's covered by warranty. Used battery packs will get cheaper with time, especially 8 years from now when the warranty on a new EV is done.
Good for you that your car hasn't broken yet. I have a friend who got a bad transmission in her Subaru, it was replaced after something like 500 miles. Are you claiming that every new ICE vehicle that had ever been sold have had 100% working drive trains for the entirety of the restraint period?
Or are you comparing your anecdotal experience with a FUD news story about one person who had a lemon of a vehicle that happened to be electric
First of all, find me a corvette that blew a motor under 100,000 miles without being abused to hell first.
Second your trying to compare a sports car tesla with all its speed unlocks to some sorts of all wheel drive sport car with an automatic tranny? I'm talking more about common cars for getting around in like a Camry compared to a tesla model 3.
Also to that effect, 95% of the time if you change the oil in a camry every 7,000 miles and the transmission pan fluid every 50,000 miles the motor and transmission will last over 300,000 miles. If the engine does blow you can get a new one installed for $5000. If the tranny goes out it will cost you $2,500. When the battery of a model 3 goes out, which is guaranteed regardless of how well its cared for due to its chemistry, a battery swap will cost you $16,000. Double the cost of a motor and tranny.
You spout the same misinformed nonsense as half of everyone here. You don't know how things work. You don't know battery chemistry. You don't know how to make your own repairs. You still try to have an opinion. Save it and stick my name to it. All of you people are going to start figuring this out over the next five years when the junk yards start filling up now that mass produced EV"s have been in production on a large scale as the earlier ones approach 15 to 20 years old.
You can buy a model 3 that goes 0-60 in 3.1 seconds, right now, on their website under 40k after tax rebate. Go look. Under existing inventory. All prices exclude the 7500 credit.
Are you claiming GM never made a lemon? That no car, ever, in the history of their company, was sold with a bad motor?
And stop it. You're comparing the cost of a new battery now vs what the cost of a used battery will be in 8 years. Claiming that technology doesn't get cheaper is absurd. You can buy a used Nissan leaf battery for $3,700.
https://www.partrequest.com/catalog/electric-vehicle-batteries/nissan/nissan-leaf
Dude. You obviously don't know how a used or refurbished ev battery entails (it's a terrible option) and a Honda leaf has an 85 mile range. It's a small battery (why they're cheaper. It's less battery) and you can replace it without ripping the car apart. An 85 mile range is a replacement for almost no one. Model 3 is the most sold ev in the US. Go educate yourself on what it actually takes to replace That battery. FYI- it's a 1,060 pound battery. You have to pull the back seats, disconnect it, raise the car up on a lift, drain the coolant, disconnect the lines, use a special jack setup to support and lower it (its across the entire bottom of the vehicle between the front and rear wheels) and then raise the new one up in its place. You can "man handle" a little leaf battery. The model 3 will cost you $20,000 between battery and labor.
Also, who cares how fast your car can do 0 to 60? Are you 17 and think it's cool?
Cole, shut the fuck up. You're what we call a shade-tree mechanic, and a particularly weak one at that.
What was the lack of understanding you showed last time, something along the lines of "show me a battery you can get more than 1200 cycles from" and when I pointed out that you didn't understand the definition of a charge cycle, you just... Vanished.
What's a charge cycle, sloth thoughts? Is it what a battery in the lab, going 0 to 100% to 0 does to determine longevity? Is the more realistic 95-45% in an EV a "cycle" or only part of one?
Is losing 75 miles of capacity on a 220mi battery after 12 years on a car unacceptable? Aw poor genius, I guess you don't remember how shitty gas engines run after about 2-300k miles. Meanwhile your electric car has gone a minimum 300k miles (250mi x 1200 cycles) and are still able to accelerate with full power and efficiency.
As I said before, people like you are why we have professional engineer licenses, lest the pubic believe a charlatan lowlife such as yourself.
You think you won at something in an old string because I stopped replying to your dumbass nonsense? A cycle is a complete discharge and charge, BTW.
Also, ice engines run great beyond 200k miles. They don't "get worse" like EV's do. I own two vehicles at my house right now that have 230k on one and 239k on the other. They don't burn oil and they still get the rated mpg. Ice engines don't wear out and start getting shitty as miles go up until they have a major failure like a rod go out or a blown head gasket seal. Sorry you never knew how to take care of a vehicle.
What I seem to see most on Lemmy is split 50/50 between “EVs are way worse than cars because they are heavy and have tires and tire particulates are FAR worse than tailpipe emissions, and ICE vehicles weigh nothing and don’t have tires anyway” and “EVs are cars and cars are the devil - if you don’t live in a city center and use a bike exclusively you might as well be slaughtering children by the hundreds, because there is literally no moral difference.”
Here we fucking go. Hello coleSlut.
Remember the dunking I previously laid on you about your science-free rants, because one of us works on systems like these, and the other is an ignorant dunce who pretended to be an engineer?
Would you like another go?
Aren't you delusional. Lol. As I recall you claimed to be an engineer of fuck all to do with rechargeable batteries and your wannabe opinion didn't count for shit. You wanna show me and everyone else where I pretended to be an engineer? Oh, woops. I didn't. Your dumb-ass never made it past a third graders reading comp level.
Got it, so your memory is as low quality as your amoral fetid brain.
You wanna show me and everyone else where I pretended to be an engineer? Oh, woops. I didn't.
Great, out of the gate we've got you admitting you aren't an engineer, and that's a great thing, thanks kindly. This is going the same way it did last time by the way, where it appears you got too embarrassed and left.
Now let's continue, crayon-sucker. Show me how many parts are in a normal combustion engine, between the piston rings all the way to the back of the transmission bell, almost all of which are required for a reliable drivetrain. Nice, how many parts have we got in a water-cooled electric motor?
Your turn, illiterate dunce.
You literally just said nothing, provided nothing new, failed to present a counter-argument, and tried to ignore that you were a dumbass who couldn't show anywhere I claimed to be any sort of engineer. Goodnight, my man. You're the type of idiot who thinks he's right as long as he argues the longest. Why I never replied back in the last thread again to you. You couldn't ever make a valid point and you just kept crying out word vomit.
Poor reading skills on your part. So again: how many parts does an ICE have vs how many does an electric motor? How many parts can fail or become worn before efficiency drops/engine fails for either system?
That's the point. We're indeed walking a path I've had to guide you along previously, because I'm again demonstrating to others the lack of knowledge and fact in your points.
What's difficult about that? Lol. Some simple questions and logic have you in a tizzy. Interesting.