>This is a fairly common fear for people considering a new EV: “Won’t the battery need to be replaced after a few years?”. And I think it’s even more prominent in the second-hand market: “Oh, I’d never buy a second-hand battery!”.

I will admit that both of these are nagging on me. I fully intend for my next car to be an EV, but if I was buying today, this would be a factor. I drive a 2013 Camry (that I got used) that shows no signs of slowing down. I hope to drive it for at least a few more years. If the car is still reliable when it's time to send a kid in it to college, that's probably when I'll start looking for something new. And you can show me studies all day long, but my irrational brain is just worried that I won't be able to get 15+ years out of an EV because there just aren't that many 15 year old EVs driving around today.

My other quibble is when the author says the majority of cars are scrapped at 150k-200k..if this excludes wrecked vehicles, I suspect most are sold to used markets, even foreign used markets, not scrapped.

Yeah as far as I can see all the companies that study EV batteries and provide degradation reports etc. all do so by using the data from the manufacturer. I would trust data about battery degradation a lot more if the data came from an independent data logger, logging voltage and current.

I'm a bit confused as you're saying this article refutes your hypothesis, right?

I'll also offer up an example. The Polestar 2 (prior to 2024) has an advertised 78 kWh battery, but also clearly only 75 kWh available for use. That's about 96% right from the factory. So presumably it's doing what you're saying, but it's also not a secret. It's also a way to prevent regular 100% charges from happening, which have proven to accelerate degradation.

I don't know who's "we" but i'm not among them.

Also the early Nissan Leafs, pioneers in the mass-market EV space, had batteries with only air cooling and which experienced significant degradation.

More modern EVs with full liquid thermal management and newer cell revisions and chemistries seem to be holding up much better over time.

Some chemistries like LFP have even greater cycle and calendar life in return for a bit less energy density. Ford and GM are both betting big on these for their future entry-level EVs and I think they will end up being a common choice where maximum range isn't the customer's primary concern.

> If you have shared parking, there's essentially no way to charge your car.

The neighbourhood I used to live in London (where almost nobody has off-street parking) installed chargers into lamp posts. This BBC article has more details and photos https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67518869

Home charging in shared parking scenarios is difficult. Municipalities can add curbside chargers and in some places this is fairly common. In a private condo or apartment scenario you'd need the owner or association to agree to install them.

A second option is more slow chargers installed places your car spends a lot of time parked, like offices or transit stations if you park and ride.

A third option is using a fast charger somewhere you go once or twice a week. Like grocery stores, gyms, etc. Costco for example is adding fast chargers to their stores, which should be fast enough for a full charge by the time you actually get in and out of Costco.

Replacing cells in a pack can be difficult. You want all the cells in the pack to have roughly the same capacity and voltage curve, so that you can connect them all together and charge them at the same time.

GM says that their Ultium batteries are segmented into modules, which each module having its own Battery Management System, and that it supports mixing and matching modules of different degradation and even cell chemistry.

But anything that adds complexity to the pack beyond being cells packed in as densely as feasible is going to add costs and reduce maximum energy storage.

I think the long term answer here is that there will eventually be a used and remanufactured battery pack market for popular models, just like you can get a used or remanufactured engine today.

> Still, my point is that my parking space isn't actually mine, so I can't modify anything in the garage.

Presumably over time shared parking areas will get upgraded with charging infrastructure to keep attracting tenants.

There is also just the situations where cars are parked on the street and the cabling has to get across the public pavement to charge the car. Even though those people can deploy a charger they can't be blocking the pavement. There is a real concern here where the incentives for the individual to pay to deploy charging capabilities in their car parking bay or front garden can't actually do so because of ownership. It needs solving via legislation, a basic default that people can pay to deploy these systems themselves.

Charging on public infrastructure ought to get there in time but the really big benefit of electric cars comes when it charges at home on cheap electricity and the only time you worry about charging it at all is when you do a long trip and you have to charge it at the half way point for 30 minutes.

At my last apartment before I moved into a home where I did have the ability to install a charger, they had 4 EV chargering spots in the parking garage. I believe residents just had to pay the normal residential electricity rate to use them, they were standard commercial level 2 chargers like the kind you see in public parking lots.

All this to say, if the demand is there then shared parking structures will install them. I live in a city with a fairly high percentage of EVs, but it will continue to spread.

Some things will still add up. Someone who might be shopping in the price range for a used car with 100,000 miles might also see a car with 200,000 miles that needs brakes (probably for the first time in an EV's life), shocks, bushings, CV joints, A/C service, or possibly corrosion repair/mitigation in some climates, might choose to trade or scrap over spending those repair costs.

Also there becomes a crossover point of residual value where a car involved in an accident becomes cheaper to total than to repair, which is probably what takes a lot of cars off the road.

That mileage may stretch longer if the important parts of an average EV drivetrain can run without major service for significantly longer than the average ICE drivetrain, which seems like a likely possibility.

15% efficiency loss doesn't sound that major. My car's currently averaging 7.9 l/100km. It it goes up to 9.0 l/100 km, it means that I need to buy an additional 5.5 litres of petrol over 500 km driven, which is around 10€.

My 200k+ kilometers diesel Fiat Punto is as efficient as new.

I track gas added to all of our cars (because my dad and his dad did). I’ve driven several of them to over 130k miles and one to 242k miles. I’ve never seen even a 5% degradation in mileage from wear. (I did see the drop in mileage when ethanol was added to the standard gasoline mix. I wonder if someone is confusing that for wear.)

If I had a 10% loss in fuel economy, I’d be looking for something wrong and fixing it.

Italian cars work great in the warm and dry Italian climate, but have historically had trouble with corrosion in colder climates that they were not built for. My dad loved Alfa Romeo’s, but none of them lasted very long in Denmark. In other words YMMV.