No manufacturer is testing the batteries life by just charging and discharging them daily for a decade before releasing them. Instead they are using artificial acceleration techniques like getting the battery hot while charging/discharging continuously to simulate a longer lifetime. They can't realistically do anything else to estimate it. But it turns out heat is the big enemy for li-ion batteries and if you can keep them on the cooler side of their range they will last a lot longer.
Wasn’t the same concern with the Toyota Prius when it was first released? Only for all the doubters to be proven wrong by the taxi drivers who kept beating Priuses for decades.
In any case battery failure seems rare but it still is catastrophic and nobody can afford replacement. Hence companies should just provide some sort of warranty / insurance product for the few unlucky folks. Seems like an ideal candidate.
Isn't this old news? I remember reading about 7yo teslas used exclusively in cold climates (Norway, Finland, etc) and they found the same thing: batteries held on much better than even the manufacturer expected. And those were often 1st gen cars, which you could expect to have teething issues.
It was at the time one of the main reasons the 2nd hand markets in those countries were pretty healthy and saw a lot of movement of used cars.
They still die by calendar age based degradation. High miles low years isn't interesting. We know that works well. They don't like talking about the calendar age degradation. Every article like this leaves that part out. It's annoying. Many articles have been written like this. Many more will be written yet. I guess there are still people out there who don't know that EVs are ideal for drivers who accumulate high miles per year. Personally I don't think batteries are going to get interesting until solid state batteries. The problem is the electrolyte.
Do you have more information regarding age based degradation?
I haven't looked too deeply into the topic and I am not sure if the argument had been about pure age based degradation or about "after X years because a person will have driven Y kilometers since then".
Lithium batteries age even just sitting on the shelf. I fly RC planes and we store our batteries at 3.8V to lengthen their life, but they still deteriorate even when not used. Like anything else, I guess.
Can confirm, I bought some Panasonic cells roughly 10 years ago for a battery pack, and have ~12 cells that didn't make it into the pack.
They've been sitting unused, in their original packaging, never opened... They're still sitting at the charge they shipped at, but the capacity is so diminished that one can't even run an esp32 for a day. I've tried cycling them to see if I can get the capacity back up, but I think they're toast already.
I can't read the article, as it's paywalled, but they're all LiPo/Li-Ion batteries, what's the difference? Hell, most cars just use the same 18650 cells we use, just a lot more of them.
No manufacturer is testing the batteries life by just charging and discharging them daily for a decade before releasing them. Instead they are using artificial acceleration techniques like getting the battery hot while charging/discharging continuously to simulate a longer lifetime. They can't realistically do anything else to estimate it. But it turns out heat is the big enemy for li-ion batteries and if you can keep them on the cooler side of their range they will last a lot longer.
Wasn’t the same concern with the Toyota Prius when it was first released? Only for all the doubters to be proven wrong by the taxi drivers who kept beating Priuses for decades.
In any case battery failure seems rare but it still is catastrophic and nobody can afford replacement. Hence companies should just provide some sort of warranty / insurance product for the few unlucky folks. Seems like an ideal candidate.
Those old taxi Priuses have had their batteries replaced.
They do.
Generally enforced by regulation, particularly tied to any government grant program to encourage EV adoption.
Isn't this old news? I remember reading about 7yo teslas used exclusively in cold climates (Norway, Finland, etc) and they found the same thing: batteries held on much better than even the manufacturer expected. And those were often 1st gen cars, which you could expect to have teething issues.
It was at the time one of the main reasons the 2nd hand markets in those countries were pretty healthy and saw a lot of movement of used cars.
They still die by calendar age based degradation. High miles low years isn't interesting. We know that works well. They don't like talking about the calendar age degradation. Every article like this leaves that part out. It's annoying. Many articles have been written like this. Many more will be written yet. I guess there are still people out there who don't know that EVs are ideal for drivers who accumulate high miles per year. Personally I don't think batteries are going to get interesting until solid state batteries. The problem is the electrolyte.
Do you have more information regarding age based degradation? I haven't looked too deeply into the topic and I am not sure if the argument had been about pure age based degradation or about "after X years because a person will have driven Y kilometers since then".
> They still die by calendar age based degradation
Source?
Not OP, but this talks about it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352152X2...
Lithium batteries age even just sitting on the shelf. I fly RC planes and we store our batteries at 3.8V to lengthen their life, but they still deteriorate even when not used. Like anything else, I guess.
Can confirm, I bought some Panasonic cells roughly 10 years ago for a battery pack, and have ~12 cells that didn't make it into the pack.
They've been sitting unused, in their original packaging, never opened... They're still sitting at the charge they shipped at, but the capacity is so diminished that one can't even run an esp32 for a day. I've tried cycling them to see if I can get the capacity back up, but I think they're toast already.
Yeah, and those come at 3.8V (storage voltage) already, so it's not like they were sitting fully charged.
The article specifically talks about how this has changed with the evolution of chemistry in Li based car batteries.
I suspect the RC plane batteries you've been using for five years are not the same chemically as the EV car batteries in use in the UK for five years.
I can't read the article, as it's paywalled, but they're all LiPo/Li-Ion batteries, what's the difference? Hell, most cars just use the same 18650 cells we use, just a lot more of them.
Put them in the vegetable bin in the fridge, too. Should make them last much longer.
False
"A 2015 Model S with over 265,000 miles on the original battery (85% capacity remaining)"
That's 25000 miles per year, which is high. So the opposite of false.
The comment above is (I would guess) about the eleven years of original battery usage rather than the mileage.
The implication being that runs counter to the claim of "calendar age degradation".
So according to you, the more you degrade the battery, the longer it lasts?
Usually you would think that 25000 miles per year over 11 years would degrade the battery faster than the car just sitting around for 11 years.
This is just untrue.