A lot of the worth of an electrical automobile (EV) is in its battery. Battery replacements are costly propositions. They are often so costly that when an EV battery is frivolously broken, insurers will usually scrap your complete automobile.
A brand new examine means that, although costly, battery replacements stay uncommon.
The examine comes from Recurrent, an organization that tracks EV battery life. Their providers embody a battery life report, performing a lot like a automobile historical past report for batteries.
Recurrent says it has a “neighborhood of 15,000 vehicles” — EV homeowners who’ve joined its providers. Amongst them, simply 1.5% have had a battery changed (excluding the Chevy Bolt EV and EUV and Hyundai Kona Electrical — outliers because of battery remembers and excluded from that calculation as a result of they don’t mirror battery failure).
Most replacements, the examine discovered, occurred underneath guarantee. “For instance, a brand new Rivian has battery protection for 175,000 miles or 10 years. The federal minimal guarantee is eight years or 100,000 miles.”
Unsurprisingly, the oldest mass-market EVs had probably the most battery replacements. The Nissan Leaf and Tesla Mannequin S, two of the oldest EV fashions, lead the checklist. Which may be a perform of age. However, Recurrent notes, “vehicles within the Recurrent fleet might skew newer than the typical age of vehicles on the street. That is very true for the Nissan Leaf,” since earlier fashions lacked the telemetry connects the corporate makes use of to gather knowledge.
Tesla makes frequent element adjustments to its vehicles on the fly relatively than updating them in mannequin years. That may imply {that a} Mannequin S from one month has a distinct battery than a Mannequin S from one other. Although the automotive’s design has stayed basically the identical since 2012, Recurrent discovered that replacements are extra frequent in 2013-2018 fashions.
EV Battery Replacements By Mannequin:
Cox Automotive, dad or mum firm of Kelley Blue Ebook and Autotrader, is a minority investor in Rivian.