I’ve now had an LFP RWD MY since 2022 and now I’ve also got an NCA MY LR. Although I’m not a battery guru by any means, I’ve been tracking a lot of high mileage cars with both chemistries and have read the study on LFP BYD taxis and pretty much any other info that’s out there on them.
I’ve come to conclusion that NCA is still the vastly superior battery, for an electric car that does an average mileage - maybe 15,000km or 10,000 miles a year. I decided to post this because I see a lot of folks going on about how amazing LFP is, but perhaps they’ve not owned an LFP car, or maybe they have assumed that superior resistance to ‘Cyclic Aging’ means that the battery is better in every way.
I don’t think it is, here is why:
LFP Pro: - superior cyclic aging - great if you have a taxi or are doing a heap of charge cycles in a short time, like 60,000 miles a year or more.
LFP Pro: less likely to catch on fire apparently.
LFP Pro: A bit cheaper.
But that’s it really for Pro’s, the cons (compared to NCA) far outweigh those pro’s in my opinion for the average user.
Lower discharge and charge speeds - this sucks in multiple ways, I swear my LFP is hobbled below 20mph to save the battery - it has no guts at all and is slower than a Yaris across an intersection. It also doesn’t like regen very much because of the charge speed - so you lose regen down any decent sized hill. Plus, obviously it’s slower to supercharge on a road trip, but this is a minor thing for me.
Weight - it’s heavy! My RWD LFP car is about the same weight as my dual motor NCA car. Boo! The NCA car has a much bigger battery and a second motor! (LFP doesn’t like discharging rapidly so dual motors are out of the question)
Cold weather - LFP more affected.
Degradation - oooh touchy subject this - but from what I can see, and I’ve looked at a lot of data, LFP does something called calendar aging - loses capacity over time - it doesn’t matter too much what you do with it, (unless you only ever charge it to 50%) it will lose capacity at a steady rate. At this point, perhaps due to the 100% charging requirement, LFP batteries seem to be calendar aging more than NCA batteries - I make this statement based on fairly limited data of course. It does remain to be seen if LFP cars will fare worse than NCA cars over the warranty period, but from what I can tell thus far, I feel like my NCA battery will have more of its original capacity at the end of my warranty period than my LFP battery with the mileage I’m currently doing. Just a feeling, and based on limited data, but I’ve certainly looked into it more than most.
Charging to 100% kinda sucks too - the last 1% (calibrating) takes forever and obviously it slows down for the last 5% or so. I just don’t like my car sitting at 100% for ages, but with LFP it ends up doing that quite a bit. With NCA I like the higher charge speed right up to 80%, then I don’t mind so much if my car sits overnight at that %. (I don’t/can’t charge at home)
Anyway, that is all, as I said, I have both batteries now, so I have a foot in both camps, I don’t want to be hating on LFP, just thought I’d enlighten a few people on it, as it’s a bit of unknown and misunderstood chemistry due to not being prevalent in the US.
I’ve come to conclusion that NCA is still the vastly superior battery, for an electric car that does an average mileage - maybe 15,000km or 10,000 miles a year. I decided to post this because I see a lot of folks going on about how amazing LFP is, but perhaps they’ve not owned an LFP car, or maybe they have assumed that superior resistance to ‘Cyclic Aging’ means that the battery is better in every way.
I don’t think it is, here is why:
LFP Pro: - superior cyclic aging - great if you have a taxi or are doing a heap of charge cycles in a short time, like 60,000 miles a year or more.
LFP Pro: less likely to catch on fire apparently.
LFP Pro: A bit cheaper.
But that’s it really for Pro’s, the cons (compared to NCA) far outweigh those pro’s in my opinion for the average user.
Lower discharge and charge speeds - this sucks in multiple ways, I swear my LFP is hobbled below 20mph to save the battery - it has no guts at all and is slower than a Yaris across an intersection. It also doesn’t like regen very much because of the charge speed - so you lose regen down any decent sized hill. Plus, obviously it’s slower to supercharge on a road trip, but this is a minor thing for me.
Weight - it’s heavy! My RWD LFP car is about the same weight as my dual motor NCA car. Boo! The NCA car has a much bigger battery and a second motor! (LFP doesn’t like discharging rapidly so dual motors are out of the question)
Cold weather - LFP more affected.
Degradation - oooh touchy subject this - but from what I can see, and I’ve looked at a lot of data, LFP does something called calendar aging - loses capacity over time - it doesn’t matter too much what you do with it, (unless you only ever charge it to 50%) it will lose capacity at a steady rate. At this point, perhaps due to the 100% charging requirement, LFP batteries seem to be calendar aging more than NCA batteries - I make this statement based on fairly limited data of course. It does remain to be seen if LFP cars will fare worse than NCA cars over the warranty period, but from what I can tell thus far, I feel like my NCA battery will have more of its original capacity at the end of my warranty period than my LFP battery with the mileage I’m currently doing. Just a feeling, and based on limited data, but I’ve certainly looked into it more than most.
Charging to 100% kinda sucks too - the last 1% (calibrating) takes forever and obviously it slows down for the last 5% or so. I just don’t like my car sitting at 100% for ages, but with LFP it ends up doing that quite a bit. With NCA I like the higher charge speed right up to 80%, then I don’t mind so much if my car sits overnight at that %. (I don’t/can’t charge at home)
Anyway, that is all, as I said, I have both batteries now, so I have a foot in both camps, I don’t want to be hating on LFP, just thought I’d enlighten a few people on it, as it’s a bit of unknown and misunderstood chemistry due to not being prevalent in the US.