The only cars having actual battery issues so far are older Leafs (shit thermal management for the battery) and Priuses (they're just old).

No other EV has had major battery issues yet, so there really hasn't been time to develop a viable 3rd party battery replacement industry.

Even the actual car manufacturers tend to quote insane prices for full battery replacements because they really don't have a process in place on how to handle it yet.

"just old" applies to the battery technology used when they were built. Not to "a car" in general. It is totally uneconomic to scrap a car only because one part broke. I own a car from 1978 that is in very good shape (for some minimal maintenance cost, you should not just let it rot).

> It is totally uneconomic to scrap a car only because one part broke.

When the battery replacement cost outvalues the cars price, it is uneconomical to repair.

Everyone is always so hung up on the value of the car when it comes to repairs.

The value of the car is only what someone would pay for it. If you're planning to keep it, then that value is only an insurance number.

A car is potentially worth a lot more if you keep it, especially if the car is low maintenance. With electric cars you trade some value up front (they are typically more expensive) to reduce the maintenance over the long term. But you will still have maintenance like replacing batteries when they go. You saved the cost of filling it up with gas and changing oil for going electric. So the smart move would be to treat your car like you're still sort of filling it with gas and changing oil and put that money towards the cost of new batteries when the time comes.

Every car has maintenance costs. With electric you just sort of push it down the road a ways when it comes to the battery.

You could get a new car... sure.. but now you have a car payment, or you may have thrown a bunch of cash at the problem. But if there's nothing wrong with your car except maintenance then put that money into the maintenance. Otherwise you're just pretending to care about the environment with your electric car that you probably tell yourself is cheaper (due to gas and oil changes) and better for the environment.

This is quite different from maintenance. You already pay upfront to have lower maintenance costs, so the gas/oil/maintenance savings argument do not apply here, I think.

You usually do not throw the car when it requires a major repair, but when the car is worth 2k with dead batteries to scrap and the replacement of the batteries costs 10k, while you can find a car that is OK to drive for 9k, it is considered uneconomical to repair. Because if you can just sell the car for 2k, pay 9k for another car, you are only losing 7k in the process. Replacing the battery costs 10k - the opportunity cost of replacing the battery is 3k.

This is why a car that requires an engine replacement (for an ICE car) is simply scrapped for parts instead of putting a new engine.

Depending on your car, it may be easier to replace the batteries (and cheaper) than you think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3RCdrh666w&vl=de

Now, this probably isn't for the average person, an independent dealer or a resourceful (and careful) car owner could easily replace batteries much much cheaper.

you're right, the value of the broken car itself is irrelevant to whether it is economic to repair. what is relevant is the cost of a reasonable replacement. if it costs $2000 to to fix the car, you might be better off scrapping it and buying a different used car with that $2000 that actually runs.

I still say that's not a good argument.

If the repair costs $2000 to fix the car, and it's otherwise fine, then it's worth it over another car so long as it is still getting the job done.

Where I would agree with you is when the car is no longer safe, either from a structural standpoint, or due to safety standards improving drastically. In those types of scenarios it is worth buying a new car simply for those reasons.

Maintenance has to be done regardless of what kind of car you have. If you're skipping those steps then it'll come back to bite you. I think people just don't like maintenance because they think it should be less than the value of the car. Which is simply not the case. Cars aren't investments (typically) in the sense that their value rarely goes up. It goes down, almost always.

Maintenance is done to keep the vehicle operating properly, reliable, safe, and in good condition. Sometimes those maintenance steps may increase it's value slightly

But here's an example. Say you have a car. It's worth $1000 but is otherwise in fine condition. It runs great, it's safe, it is rust free and structurally sound. Except it needs to tires. Lets say those tires cost $750 because you also have to buy a new wheel and maybe the tires are harder to find. Do you go "well... that's too much... I'm just going to throw the car out and get a new one"

If you do, you're doing it wrong. The same is true for battery maintenance. If the car is otherwise fine, it's like buying any other maintenance. You may not LIKE that you have to pay for maintenance, but it's part of vehicle ownership.

> But here's an example. Say you have a car. It's worth $1000 but is otherwise in fine condition. It runs great, it's safe, it is rust free and structurally sound. Except it needs to tires. Lets say those tires cost $750 because you also have to buy a new wheel and maybe the tires are harder to find. Do you go "well... that's too much... I'm just going to throw the car out and get a new one

I think the same logic applies? $750 is way too low to have a good chance at finding a replacement that is relatively safe, structurally sound, etc. $2000 on the other hand is pretty close to buying a mid-2000s civic with no accidents on record. there's no clear cut answer here; either repair or replace could be the optimal choice depending on projected maintenance costs and your local used car market.

of course, this is all based on the assumption that your current car is already a beater. I probably wouldn't scrap/sell my 2017 vw if it needed a $2000 repair.

> It's worth $1000 but is otherwise in fine condition.

You need to calculate if the cost of 4 tyres plus any future maintenance costs (and the time that is going to be lost in the future for maintenance) exceeds the cost of a new car minus the cars current value.

Opportunity costs and value brought by a new car is hard to calculate, yes, but the motto is: if you like the car to spend 1000 on it, just do it. E.g. My car is 15 years old, while I can afford a brand new one, I don't, because I love it :)

There will be a third party battery and retrofit industry when enough people have them.

I scrapped my model year 2007 car when the engine block broke. The labor on replacing that exceeded the value of the car.

The calculus changes when you factor in labour cost. If the transmission from your 1978 car gives out, will you take it into the shop?

Transmission R&R on anything from 1978 is probably gonna cost less than much more "routine" work on anything from 2020.

Depends a lot on the transmission. Rebuilding a Turbo 350 or 400 from a GM car is relatively inexpensive in my experience.

Some older Model S with 60kWh batteries also experience problems (slow acceleration, limited fast charging). The degradation is nowhere near as bad as the old Leafs, though.

There are hundreds of millions of people in the world who would happily accept that car instead of what they are using. An old Model S still looks great.

There are a few Teslas with over 500,000 miles! They have a leader board but I can't find an up to date version.

https://twitter.com/TeslaMiles

https://insideevs.com/news/339110/highest-mileage-tesla-now-...

https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-record-mileage-900000-ki...

I suspect the bottom end of the market is going to disappear.

Right now I could buy a car for £1000. It won't be great but it would be good enough to get somebody too and from work and the shops. That won't be feasible when a new battery costs £5000 or more.

It’s worth pointing out that the cost of a battery is effectively pre-paying for ~5 years of gas (how much you drive dependent). If you finance your used car (as many do when they buy used from a dealer) the lifetime costs and payment schedule would probably be about equivalent.

“Pre-paying” isn’t in the vocabulary for many though. You seem financially savvy, if you were to randomly sample the market how car buyers do you think have the level of resources and discipline to actually follow through with this?

New or used? In the US the realistic floor for a new car is 20k. A few smart cars and such for less, but not anything sold seriously.

Is this real? In Europe you can get a Fiat Panda, brand new, for 9k€. Smallish engine, barebones interior, but overall a pretty decent car.

Yes.

Cheapest Honda 21k https://automobiles.honda.com/tools/build-and-price#panel-so...

Cheapest Ford $19,995 https://shop.ford.com/showroom/?linktype=brand&intcmp=hp-sho...

Those budget brands generally don’t have dealers here.

Like I said you can maybe find a weird budget dealer somewhere, but it’s well under 1% if sales volume.

Low budget people typically buy 3-15 year old versions of these cars (which is easily under 10k cost).

You picked a brand that is a hallmark of upper middle class conspicuous consumption and a brand that doesn't make economy cars (for the North American market) anymore.

The Mitsubishi Mirage, Nissan Versa and Chevy Spark (hatchbacks comparable to the small European cars the GP mentioned) MSRP at under 15k.

No one buys those though

https://carsalesbase.com/us-chevrolet-spark/

What % of new car sales are under 20k? 5% maybe?

Honda fit? https://automobiles.honda.com/tools/build-and-price-trims?mo... "Starting at $16,190"

Nice, had to dig deeper to find it.

https://carsalesbase.com/us-honda-fit/

Only sold 32k cars in 2020, basically a rounding error compares to overall Honda sales. 260k civics and 200k accords.

>Is this real? In Europe you can get a Fiat Panda, brand new, for 9k€. Smallish engine, barebones interior, but overall a pretty decent car.

Mitsubishi Mirage and other ~15k hatches fly off the (metaphorical) shelves.

Just not in the kinds of neighborhoods HN tends to live in.

Also HN's househeeper tends to buy a used Corrolla (or some other hallmark of upper middle class conspicuous consumption) from one of their clients so HN doesn't have that sort of exposure vector either.

19k cars sold in 2020?

https://carsalesbase.com/us-mitsubishi-mirage/

That is a tiny tiny fraction of things like Corrola and Civic.

Used of course, you can't buy a new car for £1K anywhere.

nissan versa starts at $15k. it's a subcompact sedan that I would never want to own, but it has four doors and can fit two child seats in the back row.

With how much the prices of batteries have come down in the last decade and the battery improvements. Nissan should give a cheap battery replacement to people that want it. This guy upgraded his himself https://thedriven.io/2020/11/04/nissan-leaf-owner-upgrades-e...

An EV inverter for $200 can allow your car to power your refrigerator + router/phone/laptops for many hours (days for a LR Tesla).

A powerwall has what, 12ish KW usable (less in reality) which a single one can power a house for for up to a day if you're careful about what you're using. If you scale that up to the 75KW+ batteries being put into EVs today buying an inverter could be a good investment if you live in an area with frequent power outages (or a cabin or whatnot).

There was also some talk about Teslas being able to send power back to the house with the new HPWC - not sure if that ever happened.

Nissan LEAFs (since the first generation I think) have had the tech built into the car to support this, but so far the corresponding hardware to connect it to the grid hasn't been available outside Japan. In the UK trials are starting for it now:

https://youtu.be/kl9_cWF7fXo

The Roadster was able to do it, but Elon said that it wasn't used enough, and probably it's not worth it because of the battery degradation.

AFAIK there are other makers that are also ready for this. I seem to remember that the Leaf is.

What I think will be the hard part of including cars into the grid is the warranty issues. I.e. if a battery gets so much usage from the grid that it somehow gets broken or worn out, who should take that cost/ risk?

IIRC, it was added in one of the charging standards, I want to say it was CCS. In theory every car that supports that charging standard should be capable of it, but in practice that will likely be a different matter. As few people need it, few people are likely testing that it works.

I've heard the hard part right now is more regulatory in nature. Especially in the US where energy regulations vary not just from state to state, but also sometimes regionally within states based on power utility provider for a region.

My two person household uses maybe two kWh per day.

I find that very unlikely if you have any appliances at all. Multiple it by ten and I might start to believe you. For reference, right now we, granted in a four person household and electric heating in the coldest winter month, are using around 100 kWh per day. Even when the house is unoccupied in the summer the consumption is around 3.5 kWh per day. That is probably mostly just a fridge and two freezers.

From May 2019 to January 2020 we used 706kWh. I have a fridge but no other appliances that constantly draw power. I don't heat electrically, but I cook using electricity. I run the washing machine about once a week or so and hang-dry the clothes.

I guess I've used a bit more electricity during the last year because I worked from home more, but I doubt it's a factor 10. 100kWh per day would cost more than I pay for rent...

Do you heat water with electricity? That’s a big part of our consumption. Just by looking at what hour we use electricity I realise that just the kids bath every evening is around 2kWh.

And with two small kids the laundry machine runs at least once per day and the dishwasher at least twice when we both grownups work from home.

No, no heating or hot water with electricity.

100 kWh per day??? You're burning it like there's no tomorrow. Or somebody is stealing your electricity. My experience from 2-5 person households is that 20 kWh per day is a _very heavy_ consumption. I couldn't even imagine for what is 100 kWh per day needed.

Is that including hot water and heating? Because those are where most our electricity go. We burn no gas or oil.

Hot water yes, heating no. Luckily both countries in which I lived have central heating.

I agree that a lot of kWh are needed for heating. But I hope it's, in your case, for less than 6 months a year? Did you notice a difference in consumption in summer and winter months?

Oh yes, in the summer we use something like 20-25 kWh per day, and it is clear that the bulk of those are used either when we cook or when someone is using hot water.

With a household of 4 and doing everything electrical (cooking, heating, hot water but no electric car) we use on average about 9-10 kWh per day. A bit more in the winter, a bit less in summer. This is a well-insulated, relatively recent house in western Europe. 100kWh seems excessive to me.

This is a 45 year old house with crappy isolation. Compared with similar households in the area our consumption is about 20% higher than average.

Wow, that's really impressive! I'm jealous!

I live in a just ok, older, 65m^2 (700sq ft) apartment in the midwest US with one other person. Everything is electric except the water heater.

We average about 30kWh/day in winter and summer, and about 15-20kWh/day in the fall and spring.

And here I thought my ~5 year old house was efficient at 25-30kw per day. Granted I do charge my ev. But my heating and water, water and oven are gas.

Why would you want to stress a very expensive and hard to replace car component - reducing its life.

Just put some solar panels on your roof

Night during an outage?

A good generator cost 5k or more. I have a 75 kWh battery sitting in my garage. Bummer the tech isn’t right to reverse the flow. My understanding is Tesla don’t have the right part to reverse the AC flow.

This use case is for a 1-2x /yr event, not an every day thing. Also, solar panels do nothing for you if there is a power outage when there's no sun...

So Tesla makes a lot of changes for a facility that a tiny number of people will use once or twice a year.

Refurbishing old car batteries into a Powerwall type of device might make more sense though for a domestic use a fuel cell make more sense.

I've got a 13 year old Prius and its battery is still working! I did have to replace its coolant pump a few years back, but it's still working after 174k, and it's a 2008 battery.

I also drive a 2008 Prius with the original battery. Only things I've had to replace after 180k miles is 12v battery, oil, oil filter, air filter, tyres, wiper blades, lights, brake pads and hand brake cable.

Basically things that regularly need changing, although the hand brake cable is probably the exception to that.

Most reliable car I've ever owned.

On the radio the other day there was a car show and they were talking about costs for battery replacements (and then it was advised to replace board computer, managing the batteries too) for a Tesla, I was shocked by the costs. I don't recall the exact but he was 30k+ euro lighter. I was interested in a electric car, but interest dropped significantly after hearing that. Maybe I don't know enough about cars to compare to regular gas cars maintenance costs.

What does ut cost to replace an engine on a BMW? Thats probably thr closest equivalent

According to this internet anecdote, up to $10,000 or so for parts and labor which is about what I'd expect.

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080401174600A...

Maybe back in 2011 when that was posted, if the swap was for a second hand engine out of a crashed donor car that happened to be on-hand at the independent workshop where the job was carried out.

I'd wager a guess that you'd be looking at well north of $30k for putting in a brand new engine in a Tesla-bracket BMW of semi-recent vintage.

Anecdote but even back 4 or so years ago I got a similar quote (10k) to replace a BMW engine with a new crate motor at the dealership. Let’s not make assumptions.

Tesla goal is to get battery replacement cost down to 4-7k.

I think right now it’s 13k? So maybe a tad more than a BMW engine but falling fast.

The point is you'll never need to replace the engine in a BMW unless you got into an accident or something like that. EV batteries will just degrade with normal usage.

That's simply not true - of many makes of car, but BMW in particular. There are lots of issues with combustion engines which can be fatal - look at the issues with vanos bits dropping into them, camchain failures, etc.

I buy and sell cars as a side gig, and there are plenty of models which people like me would not touch with a barge pole because of issues like this - many of them German - and you'll find many for sale as spares or repairs, and find that secondhand engine supply is low (as many have blown up), and therefore expensive. Look at a diesel vauxhall insignia, for instance. Hand grenade engine, no chance of getting one secondhand (and even if it did, its got the pin pulled).

I'm sure there are exceptions, but engine problems are way, way less common than the accepted degradation of batteries over their lifetime. Most car engines keep working well even after running 100-200k kms. There is no "accepted" degradation into uselessness as we have for lithium batteries.

The same degradation happens with ICE engines - they lose power and become less efficient.

And batteries which are thermally managed (ie anything but an old leaf) will have a better lifetime than a typical ICE engine -tesla easily achieve 300k miles with less than 10% range loss.

I'm interested in this as well. The overall median and mean ages of an EV with their first owner is still way above the decades lasting 3 year ICE mean.

This doesn't seem to be just an "early adopter effect" as the "neophilia" of "early adopters" you would think would trend the other way to a shorter first owner life.

If the increased first owner life of EVs remains as more "normal" people buy in, that implies there may be a major shift in the secondary/used markets and that may be fascinating to watch. It might possibly be a hugely surprising (to some) secondary effect of an EV transition. There's a lot of jobs in the used market, and such a big shift could disrupt those jobs quite a bit.

(I've got a 2012 Chevy Volt myself and don't feel a lot of pressure to replace it any time before the 15-year warranty on the drive chain/battery. I probably wouldn't replace the battery, as the small bit of pressure I do feel is that it is about time to get rid of the compromise of having an ICE generator backup I hardly/never use and move to a full proper EV.)

My issue is I always like the next best thing. What that takes the form of isn't always obvious even to those who know me. Some are making mock fun with me over the fact my Tesla is nearing three years as I do tend so swap nearly every other year if not earlier.

However from my 17 Volt to my 18 Tesla 3 I am now only considering BEVs, I really cannot reason myself back into a petrol powered car. With motorcycles there is no real alternative if you want to travel. For the most part they are still in "Leaf" tech with only dipping their toes into liquid cooling the pack and or motor. Worse is that most are useless for commuting as they don't have storage space or wind protection; protection which would improve their aerodynamics.

Late 2021 promises to have a much wider selection and 2022 should be a watershed year for EVs. Car wise I would love a good four seat convertible option. To me the EV power and open air travel were just meant to go together, too bad VW doesn't see fit to bring back the Beetle in that form as both previous incarnations were ideal for EV

I think it will be really interesting to see what the residual value of the old battery will be. Could be really high- 50% original capacity is a problem for cars but not for grid storage (if the price reflects remaining capacity)

50% capacity for energy storage might be ok for Home gamers but no utility scale project is going to spend all the money on permitting, construction and the rest of the power infrastructure and then get batteries that are beat up.

I fail to see how permitting, etc. has anything to do with battery capacity. The only thing that will matter is price per kWh of storage and if used batteries can be sourced, binned and serviced reliably.

Reliably might be a key word there.

The cost of the batteries is probably not a large component of the overall project cost which includes permitting, insurance, substation, inverters, labour, transportation of all of the above equipment. So to then cheap out and buy batteries that have half the life or half the density and probably greater risk of failure, Fire, higher insurance costs is not something I see people managing 50-150 million dollar projects sticking their neck Out to do to maybe save 10%? But then have lower reliability, more maintenance, and a complete replacement Of all the batteries coming in half the time as it would be with new ones.

It's impossible to say without knowing actual prices and doing the math. If a profit can be made, most likely someone will do it.

This is a good point, but I’m thinking a higher return will be earned with new batteries than used ones. I guess we’ll see in 10 years If there are utility scale grid storage with used batteries!

If everybody wrote off the used batteries, then the price of used batteries would be practically nothing. And then somebody would say, Gee, you mean I can buy 1MWh of old Nissan Leaf batteries for $1,000...?

An application will be found, or they will be recycled, whichever has better economics.

80% capacity is EOL for pretty much all batteries. Below that, you start to see issues with output. Its not like a tank of gas where 80% full still means you have 4/5ths of the power of a full tank available to you.

Could you expand on what you mean by that? I have a laptop battery thats at 60% and it still allows the machine to run full-tilt of battery. I also had drones and other equipment with degraded batteries.

My parents ran their 2004 Prius until last year and it had zero mechanical problems— it was just old, and the parts that were failing and uneconomical to fix were related to interior trim degradation.

Maybe the replacement battery will have better tech!

AFAIK the main problem with the Leaf battery is that it doesn't have active thermal management[1].

I guess it's possible one could make a replacement battery pack which has an internal cooling loop, but it would be quite limited in how much heat it could get rid of through the battery case body without external radiators.

Of course better batteries might heat up less when used or charged, due to lower internal resistance, but that still leaves really hot or freezing days.

[1]: https://electricrevs.com/2019/01/31/does-the-new-62-kwh-leaf...

ha, not really.

The main problem(s) with the leaf are

- it charges to 100% every time (unless you dig into a menu, turn on analytics and switch to 80%) I never knew a leaf driver that figured this out.

- the battery size is very small, so you need a full charge to get anywhere reliably and/or drain it very low.

- to put any kind of mileage on the car, you need to cycle the battery MANY times. (one cycle might be a day's driving on the leaf, but one cycle on a tesla is a week's driving or more)

I think the leaf would be a perfect car with up to 20 miles of daily driving.

(I owned the same car as OP)

> it charges to 100% every time

Ah, I hadn't picked up on this. My BMW i3 has a built-in buffer so what shows as 100% on the dash is actually about 80%, and similarly for 0% (I verified through the raw data).

Doing true "0-100" definitely does not do the battery any favors.

The leaf also has a built in buffer like that though I don't know the exact numbers.

It also suffers from rapidgate and coldgate both.

Either the battery heats up too much during driving to accept proper charge (no thermal management). Or it's too cold to accept charge (no heating).

Why is everything a gate now, this is getting ridiculous.

Is there a website to keep track of all the gates?

Kind of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_%22-gate%22_scandals

It isn't comprehensive, though.

It's somewhat strange that they didn't add active thermal management. The Nissan electric vans do have it.

Recent Leafs have added it since, around the same time Teslas added it (but well after GM did, as GM will point to its Michigan Proving Grounds as a bitterly cold battery workout and saw active thermal management as an early requirement).

Battery chemistry has improved so while it will never be a Tesla (lack of coolant loop, etc), I have heard some folks have gotten a significantly better Leaf after replacement.

A heater for freezing days would be pretty simple.

This video describes the evolution of the Nissan batteries:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpgv-dY-q6M

It's sad that Leaf's failure makes "air cooling is bad" opinion. Leaf's approach is body contact cooling rather than air cooling. I expect properly done air cooling isn't so bad.

I could, because the 2nd generation Leaf was more of a facelift and the newer, 40kWh battery snaps right into place.

I think, there are also better compatible batteries nowadays, so if you buy a new one, you get a better car?

How much is the new battery in Holland?