• Sonori@beehaw.org
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    4 hours ago

    Honestly, i’m really looking forward to the point where their are a lot of used EVs with degraded batteries on the market. This is because battery degradation is not like the battery suddenly stops working, but rather that is consistently losses a percent or two of capacity per year. While car manufacturers consider a battery worthless when it only holds 80% of what it did new, for a car that started with a 280mi range that still means 220mi, more than enough to cross the US interstate system.

    Moreover, even that car at 50% would still have 140miles of range, which is more than enough for most city cars and nearly all commutes, even in the sprawling suburbs of the US.

    It’s also worth noting that you can absolutely swap an EV battery with another one. It’s just unplugging a few plugs and hoses, undoing a dozen bolts, and then dropping it out of the car.

    Finally, note most of the value of an EV battery is in the very easily recycled raw materials, which means that even a completely dead and degraded battery is still worth most of the cost of a replacement, and as such you’re effectively only out the difference between the raw materials and the lightly used battery your puting in plus an hour or two of a mechanics labor.

    In short, as long as people have commuter and city cars, and especially if manufacturers don’t succeed in killing right to repair and aftermarket mechanics, I expect the battery degradation fears will be looked back on in thirty or forty years as a quaint little case of making a mountain out of a molehill.