Another EV Myth Bites the Dust

One of the most enduring myths the anti-EV brigade like to trot out to anyone thinking of going electric is: “wait until you have to change the battery”. Mysteriously, this dismal band of gloomsters always “know someone who knew someone” who had had to change the battery of their EV, which invariably cost them an arm and a leg, meaning that any saving they might have made was cancelled out.

But a new study on more than 10,000 EVs debunks the myth, along with many others that the traditional automotive industry has spread for years. The evidence shows that the vast majority of EV batteries on the market will outlast the cars themselves, and will be reused for other storage applications (and eventually recycled to obtain new electrodes).

Coinciding with the outcome of previous research exclusively on Teslas, this survey covers a wide range of brands, and puts the average degradation of an EV battery at 1.8% a year, down from the previous 2.3%, while providing a comparison of the degradation curve of each vehicle based on brand and year of manufacture. In other words, vehicles more than 12 years old are still perfectly capable of maintaining around 80% of their average capacity, a perfectly acceptable figure for the vast majority of uses.

The figures are consistent with those experienced by owners of vehicles that have been in use for more than ten years under heavy use such as cab fleets, and with the experience of more and more owners who find virtually no degradation in the batteries of their EVs over the years. My car is now five years old, and I have no evidence that the capacity of its battery has decreased, and I check it on every trip. What’s more: during its first year, inexperience led us to plan two stops on our regular 600km route between the Spanish capital of Madrid and the northwestern port city of La Coruña; now that we are more familiar with the vehicle’s performance, we make only one, where we take the opportunity to have lunch. I should emphasize that we have never been even close to running out of charge, and the only unpleasant thing that has happened to us has been to get to a charger other than Tesla’s to find that it didn’t work or wouldn’t allow us to charge for whatever reason.

As if that were not enough, the average EV battery requires only about 30 kilograms of raw materials in its manufacture, while an internal combustion vehicle uses approximately 17,000 liters of oil over its life, which means that Europe’s current dependence on oil far exceeds its needs for raw materials for batteries. That gap, moreover, continues to widen as technological advances make it possible to reduce the quantities of lithium, cobalt and nickel, which are on a steeply declining trajectory.

In short, as I’ve been saying for some time, the future of the automobile is electric, which will be much better for everyone, no matter how many lies the motor industry continues to peddle. The sooner we understand this and stop believing myths (and worse, celebrating our ignorance by repeating them in every conversation on the subject), the better.

(En español, aquí)

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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