EV Batteries Are Dangerous to Repair. Here’s Why Mechanics Are Doing So Anyway

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Technology@lemmy.world – 245 points – 10 months ago

EV Batteries Are Dangerous to Repair. Here's Why Mechanics Are Doing So Anyway

scientificamerican.com

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

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You misunderstand me. I'm saying that unlike ice vehicles that will continue to get about the same mpg for the life of the vehicle, lithium batteries degrade with every charge/discharge cycle. When an electric is new and you buy one with enough range to suit your needs, every year you own it the max range on a full charge is reduced. So an ev with 120,000 miles on it that started off being able to go 300 miles max will now only go about 250 miles max. The batteries lose capacity. The federally required 8 year 100k mile warranty on batteries only covers if the capacity of the battery is less than 70% of the original capacity. Typically though, evs are usually in the range of 80 to 90% capacity at the 100k point. They don't start dropping off hard until they're closer to around 200k and over 10 years old most of the time. 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.

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.

^article^ ^|^ ^about^

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