Here's a great article that might help you
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How long will electric vehicles last?
Since most of them have only been on the market for a short time, we don’t have the evidence we have for gas cars.
There are a few older ones out there - but they were built with tech that’s quite obsolete - so that doesn’t help us. For example, the Nissan Leaf has TERRIBLE battery problems - often requiring a complete battery swap - which ain’t cheap! But that’s because they didn’t know (or didn’t care) that you need to pay careful attention to keeping the battery from getting too cold or too hot. That lesson has now been learned - and I’m pretty sure that all new EV’s have battery heating and cooling systems.
What we DO know comes mostly from Tesla - because they were really the first of the “second-generation” EV’s.
SO WHAT DO WE KNOW?
EV’s have very few moving parts — clearly parts that don’t move tend not to get worn out. There’s a lot less vibration too - and parts that are SUPPOSED not to move - but which do because of vibration would wear out sooner.
- TESLA test their motors to 1 million miles — and it’s actually not THAT surprising that they can do that without maintenance because most industrial motors of similar size are known to be amazingly reliable.
- Taxi’s and rental cars —since these are the highest mileage cars - these give us a glimpse into how these newer models will last in ordinary usage. It seems that Tesla’s last for at least 600,000 miles…we don’t know the upper limit yet - but it’s definitely “up there”. Gasoline cars have typical lives of 150,000 to 200,000 miles.
- Battery Packs don’t (typically) just “fail” — a Tesla battery pack has THOUSANDS of small batteries inside - and if some of them fail, the only effect is that your driving range drops fractionally. So as an EV gets older, we’d expect it’s range to gradually decrease. Although the range may get so short that you don’t find the car practical for your driving style, there will always be poorer people who just need to get their kids to school and get to work and back - and even if your 250 mile range car can now only cover 100 miles between charges - there will be plenty of people wanting a car that (while old and beat up) will ALWAYS start first time - even on cold/wet days.
Since battery range reduction is the biggest issue as the car ages - it’s worth trotting out this graph:
It was created by a group of Telsa owner’s clubs who asked various Tesla owners to submit their car’s mileage and available range as they aged. Because this is real-world data and independent from the car company themselves - it’s widely believed to be very reliable. Every blue dot is a report sent in by an actual car owner. The red line is the average of all cars submitted:
So what you see is that the range drops quickly over the first 50,000 km - going from 100% (or more!) down to 96%. This appears to be due to inherently poor cells (individual batteries out of the thousands in the pack) dying very soon. What remains is a pretty uniform rate of range loss of about 5% over the next 200,000 km.
So at 250,000 km (155,000 miles) - when gasoline cars are just starting to reach the age when they are heading to the car crusher) - you can reasonably expect that your Tesla will still have 90% of the range it had the day it was new.
* At 450,000km (280,000 miles) - when the vast majority of gas cars are dead - you should still have 85% of the original range.
Since the rate of decline appears to be a solid straight line - then at 1 million kilometers (600,000 miles the car should still have 65% of it’s original range - which is probably about the point where it’s value starts to decline sharply. But even a car like my Tesla Model 3 Standard-range Plus - which had 240 mile range when new - will still be able to go 156 miles per charge. That’s not really enough for long road trips - because the distance between superchargers is often a little more than that. But for someone who only needs a car to get to work and back - it’s PLENTY of range…and it’ll still be every bit as reliable as the day you bought it.
So 600,000 miles seems like a fair guesstimate for the point in time when the car isn’t worth much.
BATTERY TECH IS IMPROVING:
Not only are we getting better at making batteries with longer lifespans - we’re also increasing their capacity.
So a 240 mile range car that’s down to only 150 miles of range is starting to become a pain to deal with - a 350 mile range car that’s down to only 230 miles is still a great car that you can drive anywhere.
But better even than that, as Tesla and other companies get more experience with seeing their cars on the road - getting real-world data - they’re becoming more expert at giving advice.
When I got my car 3 years ago, the advice was to charge to only 80% of the max range EXCEPT for rare occasions when you need to stretch the range AND where you intend to start driving the car soon after it finishes charging.
But now, we’re being told that 90% is an OK charge amount - and that charging it to 100% occasionally is actually good for the battery.
These kinds of insights will improve the usability - even for EV’s that are several years old.
THE MILLION MILE CAR?
Since we know the motors in an EV can last for a million miles - and the battery tech is good for at least 600,000 miles - we’re probably going to start seeing million mile cars out there.
That’s literally more miles than an average person drives in their entire lives!
We’re approaching the time when you might buy your kid a car for a graduation present - and they’d be able to own and drive it for their entire lives!
