Electric Car Batteries! Myth Busting & How Long Will They Last?

Hi guys, I'm EVM and welcome back. Today I want to talk about

batteries

in

electric

cars because there is a monumental amount of misinformation, misinformation, half-truth, and outright lies that makes it very difficult for anyone who wants to buy an Eevee. With a little bit of confidence in this video, I hope to dispel those

myth

s so you can buy an Eevee without worrying about the stuff that, well let's be real, things like the Daily Mail constantly bash about which isn't just bending the truth, it's completely incorrect. An example of this is the almost daily feedback I get from people saying that

batteries

need to be replaced every two to three years.

I mean, let's face it, sometimes talking to these people who hear

electric

cows for reasons I can't fathom, even though I've never sat on one let alone built one is like talking to a flat earther and trying to persuade them that the earth isn't it's really flat anyway that's what this video is about to try and point people in the right direction when these questions and comments pop up so if you're thinking of buying an Eevee and you're worried about batteries then don't and hopefully this video

will

allay some of those fears let's get down to what's actually inside an electric calf battery because again there are several things I think people are unaware of the first is that there isn't just one battery in one electric calf battery if you're thinking it's something like this which is an iphone battery but a bigger version of it isn't in everything there are many many batteries in an electric car for example my sheet outside is a sheet 32-hour battery that's almost four years old and now has 192 cells, so it's not just a great battery, but a lot of batteries that have significant advantages that I'll get to throughout this video.

Another thing worth noting is that

they

are much more advanced than what people traditionally think of as batteries, so this, for example, is not the same as what you would get in an electric vehicle. much more advanced another thing electric vehicles have over typical consumer items anywhere is a battery management system now this as it sounds but BMS is its job it's just looking for the batteries not sure how much more clearly it can be I

will

give you an example of this rather than all the examples of why it actually does it, but this gives you an idea of ​​what the BMS does and why it's good for battery

long

evity now that we all know quite a bit about draining. completely a battery that doesn't doesn't do them any favors

they

don't like being completely depleted on the other hand they don't want to be fully or 100% charged as it can reduce their lifespan so what a system will do battery management is to prevent that from happening. let's take my leaf out again as an example Nissan is a little naughty on this one because they advertise it as a 30 kilowatt hour leaf actually even though that's actually about 27 and a half kilowatts of a usable battery and that's because they reserved kind of a buffer at the top of the battery and a buffer at the bottom of the battery to keep it from being fully charged to keep it from completely draining for example if I drive my blade to a literal stop then it's a zero percent to stops running and the car says it's at zero percent actually that battery is actually around four and five percent that's done just to protect the battery from going completely dead or should I say again and in it he protects her basically he helps her

long

evity and in the cap On the other hand if I charge it to 100% the lot isn't really 100% it's probably at ninety five ninety six Percent, now some cars are bigger shocks than others, but ultimately that's just one example of many things that RBMS, a battery management system, does. to protect them to

last

longer than things like this something else they have which again adds longevity and protects them but not all V's have this is a thermal battery management now Mike Lee for example doesn't have batch active thermal management not at all cars like Tesla's for example that most people are familiar with have full battery thermal management again most people recognize that when a battery gets really cold it reduces, reduces its efficiency and can reduce its lifespan too and on the other hand if it gets too hot it will reduce the efficiency and lifespan again.

What battery thermal management will do is if the battery gets too hot it will cool it down and of course if it gets too cold it will heat it up so it will maintain a stable temperature range again. to help out battery life as i said not all V's have that Thundra stuff they sure do cool down to keep from getting too hot all of those have everything and some like my blade don't have any active thermal management of battery in now overall what I'm saying is once you keep in mind you have much more advanced batteries you have a lot of them not just warned you have battery management systems and sort of management systems of thermal batteries what I am telling you do not impose your experience of these things or even these things iPhone batteries are batteries in general and think that this is how it is in an electric vehicle ignore it completely what you think you know about batteries in life normal everyday isn't what you'll experience in an electric car so that's something we hope we cleared up now they're a different animal our batteries in an Eevee compared to cellular phone cameras that's our thing now let's move on to a question which is again very often asked how long do batteries

last

in electric jack but ultimately its almost impossible to answer precisely there are myriads of variables that affect the life of anything not just batteries and i would need more information to give someone a vaguely accurate answer.

I would put that question this way if I were to ask how long does a petrol engine last, usually the answer would be which petrol engine and are we talking about a separate Dutch engine or here or a Mercedes e-class engine are we talking about cow? that it was serviced correctly I wonder if it was abused and never serviced takes many short trips many long trips drives very hard drives carefully there are thousands of variables that affect the life of an engine and a battery don't you does different get my point it's a very broad question that could only be answered very broadly but I'm going to try now what I'm going to try and do is give you two examples of Qasr so right now today in 2021 at the end bottom of the battery tech scale and one of the best so if we can see the worst case and the best case it will give us an idea of ​​where we are going so for this I am going to pick a Nissan Leaf under Tesla Model S just because both have been out for quite some time the leaf has a less advanced system we should say no battery management nor battery thermal management in terms of activity anyway where is the Tesla which is pretty much considered to be the pinnacle of battery technology right now how do they take care of their batteries so that's the place stein let's see what you'll get roughly from a leaf and a Model S now quickly to answer the question do you need to replace their batteries every two or three years i can immediately debunk that because well let's take the nissan leaf my nissan leaf for example it's 2016 30 kilowatt hours and that comes with the battery with an eight gear hundred thousand mile warranty now i know that manufacturers aren't stupid when it comes to money and they won't guarantee something that needs to be in place two or three times during that warranty period which will ultimately end up costing them a fortune if they did of course now they wouldn't let me be clear . i just said you will get a seven or eight year guarantee on all cows sold right now in the uk today depending on the manufacturer Swimmer seven somewhere eight years but that doesn't mean you need to replace the batteries after seven or eight years this other thing is people don't know they don't listen to what you say, just like you wouldn't replace a gas engine when the warranty ends you don't replace the batteries in an Eevee when the warranty ends in terms of the Misun warranty sheet and minimum 70% health after that eight year period or one hundred thousand miles now listen look at my lips minimum now again Nissan is not going to want to take a chance on this and end up paying money off with that or Nita so if they think it's going to be a 70% minimum after that period, it's actually going to be at least 75% minimum now, if we're looking at 75% minimum I would say the upper end of that scale would be around 85% after that period about 85% to 75% which gives us a rough average of about 80% average oven health on the sheets over eight years or a hundred thousand miles of course that's what what they call an average so it will be higher some will be lower now let me pause for a second and leave the nissan leaf what we just said.

I'll see what happens after 100,000 miles eight years in a minute, but now I want to see the Tesla model. S and see what kind of battery year health you'd get after a similar period now given that it's three times as expensive as a Nissan Leaf you'd expect much better health Tesla's are again known for their longevity and care their batteries are doing great and luckily because they have been out for a long time there is now plenty of data available to save me from having to do my own graphs and all sorts of things. I am taking this from a variety of sources where it comes from. the very good Electric website so this for example is actual data from Tesla Models S and X over 250,000 kilometers as you can see in this graph the red line is the average of all of them and all the points of the individual cars and what this basically tells us is that after 205,2000 kilometers you still have about 92 percent average battery health battery degradation less than 10 percent after over a hundred and sixty thousand miles console the batteries in this theater are only going to get better and better with age now this other graph here again shows 250 thousand miles and on the side you can see the battery is going from 85 to 100 percent health and it looks that there's a little dip at first and then it stabilizes but over 100 and it was 60,000 miles I think it's still over 90 percent battery health so even if we didn't lower it and said it only gets 90 percent after that period you can see there is a clear difference between a Tesla and a Nissan Leaf I guess what you get out of this is you get what you pay for but after 100,000 miles and this on the leaf is about 80 , maybe 82 percent actually and it's a little hard on these numbers whereas a Tesla and Model S or an X this is what you'll probably be at 1992 percent so clearly you have systems a lot More advanced and that affects lifespan, which again is why it's such a hard question to answer, the first thing you need to know is what car we're talking about. about this graph from a really really cool website called geotab they have a great blog that gives a lot of details and reports on 6,000 electric vehicles of a huge variety and models unless it's health and stuff like that so this is a great place to get information for videos like this now that you see and they were graphing to show you this is the battery degradation of the 2015 leaf compared to a 2015 Tesla Model S you can see a clear difference there the staff at one percent and the sheet is shrinking at a faster rate than the Tesla is obviously less than five years old because it's a 2015 Karen Ronnie in 2020 so that's why it's very hard to answer this question because the cars haven't been on the market long enough to give us a definitive answer and that brings us to another thing that is different with v compared to a gas powered car, typically with a gas powered engine even though you lose efficiency you will end up with a car that runs , a car that runs and then just stops running there will be a component failure which means the engine is just dead or just cheap to fix that's what usually happens obviously some people fix it some people might They themselves are the exceptions, but generally, you come to a point with an old car, we've all owned it. where something fails and you think it's not worth fixing so there's a definite end point with a gas powered car there or you can say it will last about as long before a major component within each of the related fails with batteries then that's a little bit more difficult because you don't get some kind of duty curve and then it just stops you get just degradation degradation degradation degradationdegradation of course mortars and whatnot can confirm our batteries now so I guess it's a case of how are you class where is the end point where it stops being usable let's take someone who needs 100 miles and range for their life they say that 100 miles is modern not for me and they end up buying a car with the 200 mile range they could have 50 percent battery degradation before it affects their life before it becomes unusable the person with the car with a 200 mile range that now only has a 100 mile range due to 50 percent degradation would not just get rid of it but sell it to someone who oh yeah shut up is more than enough for me just I need 50 miles for you to understand my point, it's very difficult to determine where an Eevee stops being usable or useful because what might be unusable to you or me might be useful to someone else, obviously because it doesn't end up as nothing it's very hard to say what they crack if someone puts a gun to my head and say i want you to give me a long term projection for a blade the one you've done in this video and the Model S, how long are they going to last?

Well I would probably predict a 2015 blade in this circumstance but it might hit that sixty percent degradation point around 175 to 200 thousand miles that's my estimate time will tell in terms of age because obviously some people do more . miles than others, I'd estimate ten to twelve years before the blade gets to that point, you can't predict the future and that's pretty hard, but given an eighty percent chance after 100,000 miles or eight years, I'd say that that's about right for me for something like a nissan leaf so 175 to 200k miles again on average someone much more than that some will be less than that i think i'll go with that one and the same for the years 10 to 12 years now when we look at the Tesla Model S well there are a million examples of hello mine was available to you I could have picked tunes however what I would probably say with 100% certainty is that, just in terms of batteries a Tesla's battery will outlast the cat considerably there are tons of people with hundreds of thousands of miles on there I think they're a gang with the highest mileage Tesla the one with 550k miles and that's on the original battery not sure about the mortars but this is about the batteries your ultimate effect said batteries will never be a concern on something like a Tesla on a leaf depending on how old it is when you get it or how long keep your cars but i think a hundred seventy five to two hundred thousand miles avocado is not too bad and again it doesnt quit it just means you dont have that much range but last time i found out what was the average life of a typical gas car the RAC said it was about 12 12 and a half years obviously some of them will last a year before they break and being told some will last 20 years and that's how you end up with an average so I think what we can take away from this is that if you buy a lower priced electric vehicle, it's clearly not going to last as long as a higher end electric vehicle, you get what you pay for in life. or not now let's move on to what if you want to fix those batteries what if you think you know what 6% degradation is now I want to keep my car and just get the batteries healthy again This is something people I usually get the number of times people used to tell me with my old sheet 500lbs our sheet that it's a much smaller battery it's going to cost me five thousand pounds to replace the batteries I wish I had a penny for every time I get one of those comments anyway ultimately this is something that will happen it's not true and it's for this reason let me give you another example let's say you have an old 15 car you know Volkswagen Golf and the engines are just gone You need a new engine, what?

What happened is hello Mr Volkswagen, yes my engines are gone in my Volkswagen Golf GTI it is 15 years old so could you try moving a new engine? gone in the real world with a new one from the dealer what usually happens and we've got it all is he'll find a used motor or maybe a rebuilt motor and get it back up and running like that i can't think of one person though i'm sure there's one out there no doubt in the comments section she's bought a new engine from a main dealer because her engine is gone at least when out of warranty it's an old car anyway and the same would be said of an EV for one that already knows there are many lots not just one so it would only replace the cells that needed to be replaced so if 40% of the cells had a fault it would replace 40% of the battery not the entire battery pack so no one is going to have an old EV and then buy a full retail battery pack from a dealer and replace the entire battery even or only half need to be replaced which it will actually happen and it happens now is they will go to a third party or independent battery specialist there are many springing up all over the country right now and they will take out your old battery and put a refurbished battery in its place in the whole battery pack i want say they probably will then renew your back and someone else will get it so it won't actually happen people won't go to any Sun with a 15 year old Nissan Leaf and say here you go fix it fix it for me charge me what whatever you want, let's be real. someone in the daily mail who does this kind of article will call nissan and say how much a new battery costs although in 15 years it will be much cheaper how much a new battery costs oh that's five grand for the eyes amore i'll put that in my article it doesn't make more sense than finding a new Golf GTI engine would make crazy sense that's what you have to spend after 10-15 years of owning a Golf GTI for you to get what I'm saying here a replacement wouldn't be all the battery it's going to be just the route you needed it and usually you wouldn't go to a mainline dealer you don't want to get to that edge anyway it should also be noted that looking at a 10 year old electric car today is not indicative of what a car will look like today 10 years from now battery technology is advancing i mean it is advancing year by year so a jack today will be MOT will last longer and more advanced than the car of 10 years ago so Of course, just as a gasoline engine becomes more efficient where it comes in, they are better designed. who knows where we'll be if solid state batteries become a thing and a lot of people think it's going to work, there are even some manufacturers who claim they've already figured it out that it will change everything completely, but that's for another video and anyway, hopefully this has explained a bit more about EV batteries in a non-technical sense, of course at the end of the day I'm NOT a battery specialist, I'm NOT an engineer, so take everything with a grain of salt on YouTube, especially if it's in the mainstream media too, but I've tried to back up everything I've said here with at least some evidence and I'm confident in the assumptions I've made here that they're now correct, of course if I have something wrong, I'm I'm sure people have told me that in the comments 14 million times already, so I apologize for that, but I crossed my fingers.

I think in the last 2-3 years but now I'm no better as it got you thinking look they know and I'm still not convinced let me know that's what comments are for but be courteous that's all What do I ask for? I don't care about questions, I don't care about opposing opinions and as long as I come back to eat somewhere saying electricity has crap and unless I can drive 800 miles on a single charge I'm not interested that doesn't help. Anybody does, I mean, I love coming, unless I can do 800 miles. that happens all the time, doesn't it?

As always, thanks for looking. Please subscribe. Aid. and i will see you soon