Many people who buy electric cars now have a hidden worry in their hearts:
“Will the battery be useless after driving for a few years? I heard that it costs more than 100,000 to replace the battery?”
Especially some car owners who have used them for a long time, when they see the battery life gradually shortening, they are even more worried:
“Can this electric car really be driven for more than 5 years? If the battery is really not working in the later stage, won’t this car be useless?”
This question is not big or small –
It is related to a core judgment: Is the electric car worth owning for a long time?
There are many different opinions on this issue:
Some people say that it can still run 90% of the battery life after 6 years, and some people say that it has dropped by nearly 30% in less than 3 years, which is really unbelievable.
What is the truth?
Today, let’s talk about this issue.
01 Is the life of new energy vehicles really not good?
When it comes to this topic, to be honest, the life of new energy vehicles is much longer than we think.
Many people worry that the battery will not last more than five or six years, and the battery life will drop sharply after a period of use.
But some real cases have already broken this anxiety.
For example, a Model 3 abroad has run nearly 320,000 kilometers in 6 years, and the battery can still maintain more than 85% of its capacity.
And the owner is still a typical “high-intensity user”: fast charging almost every day, charging the battery directly from low to 100%.
But even so, the battery life is still stable, with no obvious decline.
Coincidentally, a Korean owner named Lee Young-hoon drove an Ioniq 5 to 580,000 kilometers, and the battery still has 87.7% of its health.
What’s more exaggerated is that the car company itself couldn’t stand it and took the car back for free to dismantle it for research-
It turned out that the battery was basically fine, but the tires and brake pads were worn out.
If this is replaced with a fuel car, the maintenance of engine oil, spark plugs, belts, etc. alone is enough to toss people more than a dozen times.
Not to mention in China.
The first batch of BYD e6 taxi owners faced mandatory scrapping after 8 years last year.
The results show that many cars still perform well after running 1 million kilometers.
Some car owners even think that it is a pity to force them to be scrapped after 8 years, and they can actually be used for a long time.
02 Is this an isolated case?
Seeing the above examples, some people may think:
“Maybe it’s just luck? Are only a few models or individuals so durable?”
This suspicion is actually normal. After all, no one buys a car to “gamble on probability”.
But the truth is:
This performance is not an isolated phenomenon, but the “average level” of mainstream electric vehicles today.
Why do you say that?
First of all, let’s talk about the battery itself.
The current mainstream ternary lithium battery generally has a cycle number of about 1,000 to 2,000 times;
And lithium iron phosphate is more powerful, and can reach 3,000 times or even more.
You can figure it out by doing a calculation:
Even if you run 400 kilometers per charge, running 2,000 times means 800,000 kilometers.
In other words, as long as you don’t drive Didi every day, theoretically, this battery can last for more than ten years, and there is no problem.
Let’s look at the whole vehicle level.
Now the design life of most new energy platforms starts at 15 years, and one million kilometers is a common goal.
Because of this, the battery generally has a warranty of 8 years/120,000 kilometers, or directly promises “free replacement if the power loss exceeds 20%”.
Not to mention that big data has also come out to “stamp”:
The global data platform Geotab tracked more than 10,000 electric vehicles and found that the average annual battery decay rate was only about 1.8%.
At this rate, after driving for 15 years, the battery can still be 70% to 80% healthy.
It is much more reliable than the “lithium battery cognition” of mobile phones and power tools.
So, those impressions of “fast battery life and not durable batteries” really need to be updated.
Then the question is:
Since the life of mainstream new energy vehicles is not bad, why are there so many people on the Internet saying that “the battery is not durable” and “it needs to be replaced in three to five years”?
03 Why is this the case?
The reason is actually very simple: cognitive dislocation + early shadows, double superposition.
First of all, our brains have long been trained by “battery anxiety”.
If you don’t believe it, think about it. The battery-powered things around us, from mobile phones, electric cars to sweeping robots, which one doesn’t have a battery that fails after two or three years?
As time goes by, the battery loses power faster and faster, and replacing a battery is more expensive than buying a new one.
So this set of cognition is automatically applied to electric cars: they are all lithium batteries, how bad can they be?
Secondly, there are indeed “negative teaching materials”.
The earliest batch of new energy vehicles, battery technology was not mature, and BMS (battery management system) was not smart enough. It was not an isolated case that the battery lost 30% to 40% in three or four years.
Especially some low-priced cars, in order to reduce costs, sacrificed battery quality.
With more use, the “bad reputation” will naturally spread quickly.
It’s like you ate spoiled milk once when you were a child. Even if you change the brand when you grow up, the psychological shadow is still there, thinking that “dairy products are not reliable.”
But the reality is: today’s electric cars are no longer at the level of ten years ago.
A data analysis of 30 million mandatory inspection vehicles in the UK found that:
The expected life of the latest generation of pure electric vehicles is basically the same as that of fuel vehicles, with an average service life of more than 18 years.
Stanford University’s research also came to a similar conclusion: real urban road conditions are more friendly to batteries, and the life span is 40% longer than experimental predictions.
Nissan also publicly stated that “almost no batteries of electric vehicles sold in the past were scrapped in advance” and are still in service.
In other words – most of the horror stories you hear are old news; the electric vehicles in front of you have already been reborn.
In general, the life of new energy vehicles is much longer than imagined.
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