No manufacturer is testing the batteries life by just charging and discharging them daily for a decade before releasing them. Instead they are using artificial acceleration techniques like getting the battery hot while charging/discharging continuously to simulate a longer lifetime. They can't realistically do anything else to estimate it. But it turns out heat is the big enemy for li-ion batteries and if you can keep them on the cooler side of their range they will last a lot longer.
Wasn’t the same concern with the Toyota Prius when it was first released? Only for all the doubters to be proven wrong by the taxi drivers who kept beating Priuses for decades.
In any case battery failure seems rare but it still is catastrophic and nobody can afford replacement. Hence companies should just provide some sort of warranty / insurance product for the few unlucky folks. Seems like an ideal candidate.
Isn't this old news? I remember reading about 7yo teslas used exclusively in cold climates (Norway, Finland, etc) and they found the same thing: batteries held on much better than even the manufacturer expected. And those were often 1st gen cars, which you could expect to have teething issues.
It was at the time one of the main reasons the 2nd hand markets in those countries were pretty healthy and saw a lot of movement of used cars.
They still die by calendar age based degradation. High miles low years isn't interesting. We know that works well. They don't like talking about the calendar age degradation. Every article like this leaves that part out. It's annoying. Many articles have been written like this. Many more will be written yet. I guess there are still people out there who don't know that EVs are ideal for drivers who accumulate high miles per year. Personally I don't think batteries are going to get interesting until solid state batteries. The problem is the electrolyte.
Do you have more information regarding age based degradation?
I haven't looked too deeply into the topic and I am not sure if the argument had been about pure age based degradation or about "after X years because a person will have driven Y kilometers since then".
Lithium batteries age even just sitting on the shelf. I fly RC planes and we store our batteries at 3.8V to lengthen their life, but they still deteriorate even when not used. Like anything else, I guess.
I can't read the article, as it's paywalled, but they're all LiPo/Li-Ion batteries, what's the difference? Hell, most cars just use the same 18650 cells we use, just a lot more of them.
In any case battery failure seems rare but it still is catastrophic and nobody can afford replacement. Hence companies should just provide some sort of warranty / insurance product for the few unlucky folks. Seems like an ideal candidate.
It was at the time one of the main reasons the 2nd hand markets in those countries were pretty healthy and saw a lot of movement of used cars.
Source?
I suspect the RC plane batteries you've been using for five years are not the same chemically as the EV car batteries in use in the UK for five years.
"A 2015 Model S with over 265,000 miles on the original battery (85% capacity remaining)"
The implication being that runs counter to the claim of "calendar age degradation".