Initial range: 315/500 m/km
Updated Range: 325/520 m/km
Current Range*: 302/483 m/km
*(maximum charge I see when recharging over night)
Using the 325 as a starting point, that's 7% decrease in range after 85k/136k m/km.
Using 30% decrease as the point where you'd upgrade the battery, and prorating from 7%, you'd drive 360,000/577,000 m/km before needing to replace it.
At 18,000/29,000 m/km average annual driving distance, you'd drive 20 years before needing to replace the battery.
I imagine in 10 years today's battery tech will be obsolete. I am still on the fence about getting into an EV, it still appears to be an early adopter technology.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-tesla-model-3-survey...
What's your basis for this? Battery tech has largely been incrementalist for the past decade, are there specific breakthroughs you're watching?
I am not a Tesla owner so sorry if this is a stupid question: Are the values you posted the ones listed from the car dashboard ? How do those compare with the effective/real range ?
The amount displayed represents an average based on driving style, changes in elevation, windspeed, ambient temperature. For example, if the drivable distance indicates 200 miles, and I drive that distance on a level road at 65 mph in still air at 70 degrees F, I can go 200 miles.
If I drive it at 85 mph, I'd get about 160 miles.
If I drive it at 55 mph, I'd expect 210-220.
Up hill into the mountains has a significant decrease, and driving downhill can actually restore energy, depending on the rate of decline and driving speed, thanks to the regenerative braking.
I do think the calculation could be more accurate if neural nets were used to learn a specific driver's style, combined with driving destination in the navigation system, ambient temperature, air conditioning drain, etc.
EVs typically come with a configurable maximum charge limit (e.g. 80% or 90%) which avoids a lot of battery wear.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27970913
Cannot comment on the main point of your question. Battery duration. Somebody should include that in depreciation calculations concerning car resell value.
It's a design parameter for the battery and its management system. Basically lithium ion battery lifetime is a function of what you cap the charge at. If the battery design sets the "100%" point in the BMS close to the chemistry's max capacity, you will get a low number of charge cycles. Phones have a shorter design lifetime than cars and make more aggressive compromises towards lower size and weight.
Yep, don't buy into super duper larger batteries.
A bigger battery will last longer in cycle life, sure, but the vehicles itself may well be much more expensive.
If your EV will survive long enough to see a battery replacement, then a larger battery will be still a worse option economically.
It would be interesting to understand the true environmental impact of EVs.
https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/tesla/352330/teslas-new-low-co...
I know they tend to exaggerate but even if its only half that then it will be better than the average ICE car.
At least, the battery case can support its own weight. This alone can shave up to 100kg from the battery, and make the whole task of engineering it that much easier.
This is what all that "blade battery" things is about.
Another idea is that if your battery chemistry is not prone to bursting in flames like gasoline, the battery can become a decent crash energy absorber.
This way instead of having to add weight to protect the battery, you can use the battery instead to reduce the weight of existing crash protection structures.
The current "unrepairability" of today's EV's is nothing inherent to them.
There is nothing that prevents Tesla's service centres to repair their cars, say, after collision damage, which they currently refuse to take beyond the most trivial cases.
The same goes for other EV brands who say you must scrap your car after borderline cosmetic damage.
- Electric motors are inherently more robust than IC engines, and can too be rebuilt with ease if you fry them (which should never really happen when thermal protection, and cooling work as they should.)
- Electronics is the least likely part of the electric vehicle to break, and is, again, mostly trivial to repair, or replace.
- Cells are the only wear element besides a simple gearbox, and brakes.
As for the battery, there's still plenty of useful things it can do. Just because it's not useful for a car, doesn't mean it dead. The most obvious use case right now is grid-scale energy storage. There you just need lots and lots of joules of storage, you're not really worried about space or weight (at least compared to car batteries), so it's perfectly viable to take thousands of scrap car batteries with only 60-70% of their original capacity and use them for grid storage.
Additionally in grid storage you can be much kinder to your batteries, further extending their life well beyond what they could do in car.
At the end of all that, break down the battery and recover the materials. Admittedly we don't have any cost effective ways of doing that today, but as demand for battery raw materials increases, the finical viability of recycling also increases.
A 1000km vehicle that lost 90% of its range still has 100km left. I don't see how that vehicle is toast.
Also, my personal expectation is that a larger capacity means the wear is distributed across a larger number of cells, leading to increased life expectancy. This assumption fits with the warranty policy of Tesla.