A lot of the early EV battery life projections were based on Nissan Leaf Gen 1. Which had a horrendous battery pack that combined poor choice of chemistry, aggressive usage and a complete lack of active cooling.
When EVs with good battery pack engineering started hitting the streets, they outperformed those early projections by a lot. And by now, it's getting clear that battery pack isn't as much of a concern - with some of the better designs, like in early Teslas, losing about 5-15% of their capacity over a decade of use.
Don't forget that the original Leaf pack was only 24 kWh. So if you assume a ~1000 full-equivalent-charge-cycles lifespan, then the large Gen2 62 kWh pack will live 2.5 times longer than an original 24 kWh pack. If you average 3.5 miles/kWh, the 24 kWh battery will be expected to last somewhere around 84,000 miles. While the 62 kWh pack will last for 217,000 miles.
The vast majority of EV owners will spend $0 to replace their batteries since the batteries last longer than the rest of the car does.
Edit: part of that is that a Prius with 250,000 miles needing its second battery replacement is still a valuable car with a reasonable expectation of a lot more miles. OTOH a Tesla at 250,000 miles needing its first battery replacement...
Similarly Chrysler hybrid owners spend less money on battery replacements than Toyota hybrid owners. Not a compliment, it means they're scrapping their cars earlier.
My 2015 Model as’ battery went the day the warranty ended and so they gave me a trash refurbished one “half price” for $8k
This low maintenance cost thing is BS once something actually goes wrong. And it’s awfully frustrating / sus when it happens the moment the warranty ends
My 2017’s HV fuse went just days before the warranty ended. They tried to charge me $330 for that planned part.
LFP does have a lot more cycles in them by the nature of the chemistry. However EV grade NMC aren’t terrible either.
Depth of discharge and charge rate affect LFP specifically in such a way that if you keep them a good margin above cutoff voltage, relatively cool (60C and under, and do 1C and lower charging you can get 10,000 cycles per their data sheets. The same sheets will also list lower cycle counts for harder use that lines up with the standards used for earlier cells. Basically I think we’ll find a lot of gently to moderately used hardware will last a long time.
Whatever a believable use case looks like will probably end up on those data sheets and it wouldn’t surprise me if we see 15,000 and 20,000 cycles advertised for cells intended in low charge and discharge use cases (probably not cars but maybe home energy storage).
My Taycan has an ongoing battery issue relating to LG Pouch cells but its construction rather than composition that is the culprit. The same compositions from LG in prismatic and cylindrical models, the only models they sell now, so far haven’t been a mess for car makers.
I am a bit more concerned about batteries now as opposed to an year ago.
We had this article from Elektrek [1] about battery issues in South Korea. When I asked my local electric maintenance shop [2, sorry for the FB link], they said they have started seeing the same issue in Model 3s and Ys in Canada as well. (They also said that it is too early to tell how common it would become)
This may bode well for recycling since the issues is an unbalance, not the whole pack failing.
Tesla made powerwalls a product for a reason. They were supposed to come from outdated Tesla cars, but that never materialized. If it is materializing now, they already know what they are going to do.
I can respect that. For what it is worth, I validated with a well-trusted local shop that works on EVs (and works with Tesla) that said the issue is starting to pop up. Moreover, it's the government of Korea that is making this claim as well.
(I also find it difficult to separate noise from signal about Tesla. However, I don't consider them innocent victims; besides the elephant in the room, they literally eliminated their PR department)
Bad reasons to hate something are bad press for Tesla, and how many people are going to read past a headline that confirms their bias? This isn't limited to Tesla, mind you,
and is a broader statement on clickbait, and the state of the Internet and media and society today. Of course, anybody on Tesla's side knows to take Electrek and the rest of the Inernet’s coverage with a grain of salt, but with rabid fanboys on both sides, it's hard to know how large a grain of salt, and when.
Electrek's Fred has a ton of Tesla referral credits. Tesla owes him 2 Roadster's and has reneged. After Tesla screwed him, Fred's coverage turned from glowing to negative.
LiPo batteries were quiet expensive when it was initially released. NiMH was really the only option in town.
And with a lower energy density battery that's also heavier, adding a cooling system would have also added a bunch of weight to the already heavy car with a barely usable range of 100 miles.
Gen 2, however, had no excuses. They had every opportunity to add active cooling and they still decided to go with just air cooling.
Every generation of the production Nissan Leaf has used lithium batteries. AFAIK no modern (~post-2000) mass-produced (>10k units sold) EV has ever used NiMH or lead-acid batteries.
Edit: Checking Wikipedia to verify my information, I found out that Nissan actually sold a lithium-battery EV in 1997 to comply with the same 90s CARB zero-emissions vehicle mandate that gave us the GM EV-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_R%27nessa#Nissan_Altra
EVs no, but I think some Toyota hybrids (which are of course not even PHEVs) still use NiMH. Toyota tends to be very tight-lipped about their batteries and their sizes (or rather, lack thereof).
Tends to be tight lipped??? It is in the catalog[1]! It is more that American consumers aren't tech obsessed than Toyota being reluctant to share.
Even just looking at online media reports[2][3] clearly sourced from some exact same press event, it is obvious that US English equivalents are much lighter in content than Japanese versions. They're putting the information out, no one's reading it. It's just been the types of information that didn't drive clicks. Language barrier would have effects on it too, that Toyota is a Japanese company and US is an export market, but it's fundamentally the same phenomenon as citizen facing government reports that never gets read and often imagined as being "hidden and withheld from public eyes", just a communication issue.
I was looking up this year's Corolla a while ago and likewise there was minimal info that I could see about the battery capacity, which I think I figured out was about 3kWh.
Leaf Gen 1 didn't have NiMH. It had a lithium-based battery chemistry, but some bastard offshoot of it. One that really didn't fare well under high current draw, or deep discharge, or high temperatures, or being looked at wrong.
On the used market you'll find absolutely cooked (literally) Leafs whose first life was in Arizona and barely have enough range to back out of the driveway.
Is there any value in fixing the battery on these? IE: Do the other components last long enough to be worth the cost?
It seems like procuring the battery is not as expensive as the Tesla battery (I see someone who did it themselves for $6k on Youtube with the battery from a wrecked leaf). In comparison, the cost I see for my Model 3 is about ~$18k CAD.
Getting a car up and running for $8k might be worth it if it is otherwise dependable, but I've only heard unfortunate stories about the first gen Leaf.
Is it worth spending money on a car that old? You are putting more than the car is worth into fixing it and you won't get that back if you sell. You also have no idea when/if something else will go. thew worst case is the day after you fix it someone hits you and the repairs will be $30,000 - what it cost new and there are still a lot of worn out parts: insurance will give you $4000 and tell you to eat the loss.
30k is the real cost to repair some accident damage to a leaf - think bent frame. this could happen anytime. Nobody would pay that price to the whole car ends up in a junk yard.
> Gen 2, however, had no excuses. They had every opportunity to add active cooling and they still decided to go with just air cooling.
The Lizard pack in the later Nissan Leafs has held up surprisingly well. I have a 2015 that still gets 75 miles of range. I'm sure they thought it wasn't necessary and they probably had the actuarial numbers to justify it.
It didn't just had horrendous service life, it was designed for some set years of life to be regularly replaced and repurposed for battery storages. Nissan had business schemes outlined for that with Leaf packs.
I think Tesla deserves credit for rethinking hat model into chassis-life battery packs and surpluses rather than recovered cells for grid storages.
Especially considering that, resales of Gen1 Leafs milked for EVs and renewables incentives is like destination fees atrocious. You can find fairly zero-milage ones with a functional 100-yard battery pack on sale for couple hundred dollars in some places. Even crashed wrecks of a Tesla cost magnitudes more.
A car chassis is essentially immortal: 30, 40 or even 100+ years. Modern steal is franky amazing compared to cars of the past. Tesla batteries are nowhere near chassis life numbers.
I was stuck in traffic behind an 87 caddy yesterday. It was not a collector car. That chassis is still on the road, seemed to be taking kids to school.
When EVs with good battery pack engineering started hitting the streets, they outperformed those early projections by a lot. And by now, it's getting clear that battery pack isn't as much of a concern - with some of the better designs, like in early Teslas, losing about 5-15% of their capacity over a decade of use.