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How Long Can Electric Vehicle Batteries Last?

Jakub Hotek

June 8, 2022

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How long can an electric car battery last? Questions about battery life are often raised by new buyers who are switching from cars with internal combustion engines.

Electric vehicles with lithium-ion batteries do unfortunately have a lifetime limit. Fortunately, based on tests and industry consensus, lithium-ion batteries under ‘normal use’’, can easily last and be used for much longer than 10 years.

The issue is that when surpassing 10 years of use, the ‘health’ of the battery has decreased, thus decreasing the maximum capacity of charge the battery will be able to hold. Based on industry estimates, battery capacity even after more than 10 years is likely to remain around 70 percent.

This decrease can be said to be very normal and reasonable, it can still be used- Simply put a car that was able to have a range of 500km out of the factory, should after 10 years be expected to hold enough charge to still have over 350km of range.

A point to note is that the distribution of wear and tear on batteries is not constant across all the cars battery modules, thus it is enough to simply test and look for the particular modules that have experienced the most drastic decline and only replace those, instead of the entire battery pack, which could set you back a fortune. For example a vehicle with a 10 module (series) of battery packs, perhaps only 2 of them will have a battery capacity of below 60 percent, while the others could still be well in tact (over 80-85%)… In such a case it would suffice and make economic sense to simply replace the more warn modules, giving you the best value for your money. It must be noted however, only select EV’s allow for module replacement, and Tesla for example is NOT one of them.