I'm really curious to see how the used market shakes out when it becomes time to play hot potato with the inevitable battery array replacement. Gas cars need work to but that work is less costly and they can take a whole lot of neglect.
When it's time to replace, you'll get a larger battery for less money. You may be able to sell or reuse the old battery for stationary power storage.
Nissan Leaf (one of the oldest BEVs) launched with 24kWh batteries. Now it has 40kWh for the same price (even less if counting inflation), and 64kWh upgrade options.
Batteries tend to degrade 1%-2% per year, and there's no breaking point when you have to replace. In the Model S's (another old EV model with over a decade of data available) the cooling system tends to die sooner than the battery it cools.
BEV battery recycling is still in infancy, because EV batteries are lasting longer than expected.
The battery is the achilles' heel of EV's. An ICE engine can last 20+ years if you take care of it. An EV needs a battery replacement at the tune of $10K+ after 10 years at best. I think once they make longer lasting and/or cheaper batteries, this difference will level out.
FWIW I drive a Toyota ICE and fully expect it to last to 200K+ miles and 20 years. If I decide to trade it, it would keep a heck of a lot of its value vs a Tesla. Those things depreciate like produce.
If theres no road salting a car can last literally forever. Especially older cars that were built on solid platforms. So many old big block trucks or diesel mercs in socal still working fine after 40-50 years. I see even older cars too, some of them beat to absolute crap with hardly any paint left on the metal but still in service.
I did the math on the Toyota and based on how many miles I drive in a year (I work at home) and the expected life of the vehicle, it'll run reliably until I'm 169 years old. :)
The thing is with the used car market is that maintenance cost is not paid by all the owners. Its paid only by who happens to be holding the hot potato when the battery is screwed, and most people with means aren't holding a car to 150k miles, that's about how many miles an ICE car has in the maybe $5kish used range. The sort of person buying a $5k car can't afford a $10k battery. They might not have access to $10k on a line of credit either. The worst similar thing that could happen for an ICE car is a timing belt going before you replace it and screwing up the engine or the automatic transmission needing replace, both issues much less costly than a $10k battery but also costly enough that people sometimes walk away entirely from the car.
I feel like the battery cost issue is being hand-waved by too many people here. For most people driving a car with well over 100k miles, spending $10k to replace a battery is a total non-starter. In addition to batteries degrading, there's also the risk of an accident. Some crashes that would be fixable for an older ICE car will require replacing the battery in an EV at a cost far greater than the car would be worth, making it non-viable. The battery is a risk factor that many people already worried about their finances won't want to take on.
> For most people driving a car with well over 100k miles, spending $10k to replace a battery is a total non-starter.
Well do the math with prices instead of miles.
If you think you need to replace the battery soon, and the EV is $8k cheaper, it's a tempting purchase. Just don't spend the $8k on something else.
If that's impossible because the battery car would have to go below free, then that could be a problem. But that's still way cheaper than EVs are right now. I wish we had that problem! And at that point in the future, the fix is cheaper batteries, and it will happen.
> Some crashes that would be fixable for an older ICE car will require replacing the battery in an EV at a cost far greater than the car would be worth, making it non-viable. The battery is a risk factor that many people already worried about their finances won't want to take on.
I don't think the difference between "4% chance it's totalled in the next few years" and "5% chance it's totalled in the next few years" is a deal breaker. And that math is affected by so many other model-specific things too...
EV batteries don't tend to suddenly die, do they? You can negotiate a lower price for a weaker battery, and you don't have to replace it the moment it hits 80% capacity.
And we're currently talking about cars that are worth significantly more than $5k. An extra 30% to fix it up is very different from an extra 200%.
A colleague of mine bought a Tesla. He was looking to trade it up for a newer model after a couple of years and it depreciated probably $30K (nearly half) if I recall correctly. He absolutely loves the car, but nobody wants to take on that type of depreciation hit.
That's something worth nothing, but most of that is unrelated to the battery, and I don't see how it has anything to do with the rest of this comment thread.
I suspect a lot of that depreciation has to do with the battery life and replacement cost. For the current used market it's pretty drastic. I'm not sure if it's just a flooded market, a fad ending, people just don't like EV's after owning them, Tesla cutting prices, or what. Perhaps some of all of that.
A recent study from iSeeCars.com showed the average price of a 1- to 5-year-old used EV in the U.S. fell 31.8% over the past 12 months, equating to a value loss of $14,418. In comparison, the average price for a comparably aged internal combustion engine vehicle fell just 3.6%.
The Tesla Model S topped the list of EVs that depreciated most over five years; it lost 55.5% of its value, according to the analysis. Rounding out the top five were the Chevrolet Bolt EV (-51.1%), the Nissan Leaf (-50.8%), Tesla Model X (-49.9%) and Tesla Model 3 (-42.9%).
Overall, the average vehicle lost 38.8% of its value after five years, according to the analysis. Trucks retained the most value (depreciating 34.8% over five years), followed by hybrids and SUVs, which depreciated 37.4% and 41.2% respectively.
Environmental guilt only goes so far in terms of sales. For large adoption, the depreciation problem needs to be solved. Wealthy people (1st buyer) can afford to throw money at EVs over and over again and usually keep their vehicle only 2-3 years. Middle class (2nd buyer) need a dependable car that costs less per month (cost minus sell value) and lower class people (3rd buyer) need a vehicle that will last forever. The current state of EV's only satisfies the first and maybe some of the second buyer market while an ICE satisfies all three.
Well apparently the average car loses 42% of its value after three years, so if that Tesla lost an extra 10% that wouldn't be a huge difference.
5-year depreciation can be anywhere from 20 to 60 percent depending on model, and that's just looking at gas cars.
Edit: Oh you added a lot more. The wall of all EV prices falling will happen less and less as the tech matures. And even with that factor, they're still not at the bottom of car depreciation lists after 5 years.
It is not clear to me if you are deliberately mixing in a bunch of non-equivalent math.
You say that the average price of a used EV fell more than the average price of a used ICE as if that was a bad thing. But you do not tell us the corresponding statistic for prices of new vehicles. What if the average price of new EVs fell 50% but the average price of used EVs fell 31.8% while the average price of new ICEs rose 25% and the average price of used ICEs fell 3.6%?
In general I would consider lower EV prices to be a positive development. Your barage of numbers seems aimed at confusing the issue. Can you provide more clarity?
Seeing as so many of these comments are related to battery replacement costs, I wonder if this will cause Tesla to take a larger hit than most automakers in the models where the battery is part of the frame. Are these even replacable?
