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EV Batteries Are Dangerous to Repair. Here’s Why Mechanics Are Doing So Anyway (www.scientificamerican.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

98 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Fixing car and e-bike batteries saves money and resources, but challenges are holding back the industry

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[–] Nindelofocho 17 points 6 months ago (2 children)

You should see what happens to actual mpg in the rain vs in the dry. Its almost like MPG can vary wildly dependent on environment and situation

[–] RagingRobot 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yeah the whole range issue is dumb to me. You can recharge it so what's the issue? I recharge mine on long trips and stop to eat at the same time. Who are all these people that want to sit in a car for over 400 miles without stopping? That sounds worse lol I always stopped with my case car to eat or pee anyways. If I stay 30 min to an hour I can get fully charged too.

Also the benefits of never needing to stop to charge or fuel when I'm just driving around town. I can go all over and not need to charge my car for a few days. Then I do it when I sleep.

Also single pedal driving was new to me and I love that! It is so much more responsive if I want to stop I just stop going lol I love it. It has crazy torque too and makes a fun spaceship sound when I drive around.

[–] phx 4 points 6 months ago

Depends on where you live and where you plan to go with it. Our EV at current range is fine to get to the nearby large city in the summer over a fairly long stretch of highway. In winter it would probably be doable but at the least it impact our stopping/charging schedule. At 70% range it might not be doable at all in winter and we'd have to be careful in summer. Governments pushing EVs absolutely should be pushing a reasonable recycle/replacement cycle for batteries and the infrastructure to support that.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You misunderstand me. I'm saying that unlike ice vehicles that will continue to get about the same mpg for the life of the vehicle, lithium batteries degrade with every charge/discharge cycle. When an electric is new and you buy one with enough range to suit your needs, every year you own it the max range on a full charge is reduced. So an ev with 120,000 miles on it that started off being able to go 300 miles max will now only go about 250 miles max. The batteries lose capacity. The federally required 8 year 100k mile warranty on batteries only covers if the capacity of the battery is less than 70% of the original capacity. Typically though, evs are usually in the range of 80 to 90% capacity at the 100k point. They don't start dropping off hard until they're closer to around 200k and over 10 years old most of the time. Total failure due to dead shorts in too many cells has been happening around the 14 to 18 year area. That's when you decide to sell it for $3,000 or pay $15,000 to install another battery.

[–] partial_accumen 7 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Total failure due to dead shorts in too many cells has been happening around the 14 to 18 year area. That’s when you decide to sell it for $3,000 or pay $15,000 to install another battery.

If I get to 14 to 18 years on a car without every having to replace an engine, transmission, it never gets in a crash that writes it off entirely, and its still worth $3k at the end I consider that a win.

[–] AntY 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

My old Volvo is 43 years old and has never had engine or transmission changed. It’s gone for 350,000 km and is still going strong. Is probably worth somewhere in the region of $2k. I don’t see any of the cars made today managing the same feat.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That's straight up survivorship bias

[–] wikibot 3 points 6 months ago

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data. > Survivorship bias is a form of selection bias that can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because multiple failures are overlooked, such as when companies that no longer exist are excluded from analyses of financial performance. It can also lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than just coincidence as in correlation "proves" causality.> Another kind of survivorship bias would involve thinking that an incident happened in a particular way because the only people who were involved in the incident who can speak about it are those who survived it. Even if one knew that some people are dead, they would not have their voice to add to the conversation, making it biased.

^article^ ^|^ ^about^

[+] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

[removed by mod]

[–] partial_accumen 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

and most that aren’t is due to accidents.

You're making my point for me. The likelihood a car, any car BEV or not, is going to make it to your (unproven) theoretical point of being a problem is 1 in 4.

If your premise is that BEVs are good up until the 200k mark, then you're making a bad bet on your ICE or Hybrid needing to survive to the 200k mark to be worth it. With your numbers I have a 75% chance of being right, while you only have a 25% chance, and that's even if I agree with your premise (which I think is a bit suspect).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

But what does that number even mean? There are also 278 million vehicles registered in the US and only 233 million registered drivers, so I'm betting a lot of those 16+ year old vehicles aren't people's primary mode of transportation. I spend 2-3 hours commuting on the freeway and certainly don't see 1 in 4 being 16+ years old. My own car is 10 years old now and I would say it's on the older side of what I typically see.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I have three working vehicles. Four if you count my motorcycle. Two are 16 years old. A prius and a sienna. One is 18 years old. A mazda tribute. My motorcycle is 28 years old. A Suzuki bandit. I don't even own a vehicle newer than 16 years old. Did just junk an 18 year old Nissan altima because my 16 year old kid blew up the engine after way over filling the oil.

Chances are you aren't seeing 1 in 4 vehicles on your route that are over ten years old. But part of the reason (but not all the reason) is the same reason you never noticed how many of the vehicle you drive were out on the road until after you bought one. You're never looking around and thinking about it.

Also your location and what you do for a living. You a white collar going into a nice office area at 8 am or so? Newer vehicles. Go head to the old or run down portion of a city and you'll see 20 year old vehicles abound. My area has several well off rednecks that drive old fixed up diesel pick up trucks just because they don't like all the tech and tracking and Def fluid requirements on the ones from the past 15 years. One of them is currently thinking about buying an early 90s dodge Cummins for like $30k he looked at.

Myself, I like doing shade tree mechanic stuff and think it's dumb to spend a lot of money on a vehicle that looses $5,000 of its value after you drive it out of the lot. I've never had a car payment, always paid cash, and always done my own automotive work. I've spent 25 years just buying 10+ year old vehicles. Newest I've ever owned was 8 years old. Even now we're about to downsize on the minivan we don't really need any more and replace it with a 2007 matrix if we buy it, tomorrow.