Fixing car and e-bike batteries saves money and resources, but challenges are holding back the industry
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.
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.
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.
