Andrei Nedelea
One of EV owners’ biggest fears is replacing the battery at a cost of $20,000 or more. Although the battery is the single most expensive component in the vehicle, a recent study suggests that this shouldn’t really be a concern if your EV was built after 2015. Recurrent Auto has looked at over 20,000 EVs and found that, on average, just 2.5% of vehicles had their batteries replaced. This is highly dependent on the year of manufacturing, and, unsurprisingly, the older the EV, the more likely it is to need a new battery. An older Recurrent study said 1.5% of EVs had their batteries replaced. Get Fully Charged Battery degradation is inevitable, but it’s slower in new EVs If you own an EV and plan to keep it for a long time, you have to prepare for the moment when you’ll have to swap its battery pack for a new one when it loses capacity below a point when it becomes impractical. The new study found that battery replacement rates for EVs built before 2015 are as high as 13%, but for vehicles from 2016 or newer, they drop to 1% or less. The oldest EVs included in the study were from 2011, and about one in three needed a new battery, but this was due to several factors, not just their age. It is linked to the age of the battery packs. Still, the use of older chemistries and their thermal management systems is not as good as that of modern electric cars. Some older EVs have air-cooled batteries with no thermal management and suffer even more degradation. Batteries in newer EVs not only have improved chemistries that help them last longer and take frequent fast charging better, but their thermal management systems are considerably more effective and they are better at staving off accelerated battery degradation. Get the best news, reviews, columns, and more delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up For more information, read our
https://insideevs.com/news/720398/study-battery-replacement-rates-evs/