The Mail has a timebomb story that should horrify EV owners and convince those still running combustion cars to stick with them for the foreseeable:
Many EVs will lose up to 12% of their charge capacity by six years. Some may lose even more.
Yet the cost of replacing an EV battery is astonishingly high, our research found.
In some cases, the cost of a replacement battery is as much as £40,000. For certain EVs, the cost of replacing the battery could be 10 times the value of the vehicle itself on the second-hand market.
That means used EVs have a limited lifespan — which makes them a bigger and bigger risk as the years go by.
Research into EV batteries is yet to be conclusive and the second-hand EV market is new, given the first popular EVs were rolled off the production line in 2009.
Last night, one motoring expert said customers should be wary of buying a used electric car beyond its warranty (typically eight years), as after that timespan there is no easy way of measuring how much the battery will degrade before it needs replacing.
This may mean you end up needing to pay for an expensive new battery.
Pointing out that by 2035 all U.K. motorists will face paying around 10 grand more for an EV compared to its obsolete combustion equivalent, the Mail goes on to claim that’s swamped by the prospect of replacing the battery in a secondhand EV:
While you can drive a traditional petrol or diesel car for around 200,000 miles over 14 years before the engine needs fixing or replacing, by comparison a new EV is typically guaranteed under a warranty for 100,000 miles over eight years.
Should your petrol engine need replacing you can expect to pay around £5,000, but replace the battery on your EV outside warranty and you’re looking at an eye-watering £13,000 to £40,000, depending on the make of your car, if you fit a manufacturer’s new unit.
In the most extreme cases, such as with a 12-year-old Nissan Leaf that cost £2,000 to buy, you can pay as much as £24,000 for a brand-new replacement 24kWh battery.
However, most owners would upgrade to a newer 40kWh Nissan battery costing £12,780 before garage installation fees of around £2,000. This later battery has a bigger capacity but can still be fitted into older models.
The upshot would appear to be that the secondhand EV market is already dying on its feet. Battery degradation starts from an EV being new anyway. Fast charging accelerates the loss of an EV’s battery. And all those people without a garage and trying to charge their EVs outside will find the range reduced anyway.
But don’t worry, there’s glimmer of hope on the horizon, for the old batteries at least:
And what of the fate of an old EV battery that can no longer be used in a car? They typically fetch £1,500 and can be used for holding energy storage for solar panels, but many fear they will end up in landfill.
Now a host of new start-ups are racing against the clock to find a way to recycle car batteries past their prime including J.B. Straubel, former Chief Technical Officer of Tesla, who has launched Redwood Materials.
Mr. Barnard says: “The old batteries have an intrinsic worth because of the valuable metals inside them — and even if they are no longer practical for storing electricity they have a scrap value.
“It is still a relatively new market and we can expect it to grow more as we move towards a more renewable future.”
Worth reading in full.
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What an insane world we live in where “Far Worse” is proclaimed as “Far Better”. The usual suspects would be up in arms if we sent 8 year olds to dig coal; they cheer on the 8 year olds who dig up deadly, non-recyclable poisons.
“Cleaner” is now “Buy the dirty stuff from abroad and then we are net Zero and clean, clean, clean”.
Drax, I see the trains every day. “Let’s go chop down massive trees, producing carbon, chip them, producing carbon, ship them to the docks and ship them across the Ocean producing carbon all the way. Then load them on a train and produce more carbon burning them” is the insane man’s way of reducing carbon.
The RSPCA and RSPB both cheer as bird populations head down the plughole due to wind farms. How on earth can the RSPB support birds being chopped to pieces in their thousands? How can the RSCPCA et al think that destroying packs of whales and dolphins is something to support?
The list goes on and the really worrying thing is that the Plebs are oblivious.
Well of course! I mean, coal? You must be mad!
And hasn’t this madness prospered under 14 years of fake Conservative governments?
Yes but they are all in on pretending to save the planet. You will find that in the next 10 years of a Labour Government we will pretend to save it even harder and faster.
To coin a phrase, the market’s volatile. I guess it’s possible that in the future, more advanced batteries capable of being installed in older cars might emerge as you alluded to with upgrading an old Nissan Leaf, but one is gambling when deciding what to invest in at the moment.
There is no gamble with EV’s, they are a guaranteed loser.
And our politicians is putting all our money on a losing horse. The perfectly good petrol and diesel cars are being taken out of the race.
Battery technology is over 150 years old. There are no ‘advances’ left, except maybe at the margins.
But most important – electric cars need electricity. We can hardly meet demand now, there just won’t be enough generated nor the grid infrastructure needed to transmit it for a future all-electric economy.
I really don’t think that’s the case. Lithium ion polymer batteries only really began in the 1990s and one of the guys who got a Nobel prize for that (John B Goodenough) was still working to try to find something better more or less right up to his death.
What is not great is that around 20 years after their first roll out and with, it would appear, minimal research, people decided that the tech could be scaled up from the 0.06kWh batteries typically found in laptop computers to the 24kWh batteries needed for a small car – a 400 fold increase in capacity – and then expect it to just continue working indefinitely at full efficiency (just like a laptop battery doesn’t).
I recall the worry in the mid 2000s when Sony made a bunch of laptop batteries that had a nasty tendency to erupt in flames – they were rightly treated with extreme suspicion on aeroplanes.
I’m sure there will be other breakthroughs in energy storage tech in future but the current state of the art is not Goodenough to base our car industry on it.
Updated to add: BEVs should have been designed with replaceable batteries. It should not cost thousands of pounds of labour to do the job.
Does anyone have any knowledge of BEV annual servicing costs? I’d be interested to hear.
The cars themselves are pretty volatile as well
“It is still a relatively new market and we can expect it to grow more as we move towards a more renewable future.”
If this wasn’t so dishonest it would be laughable. Talk about ‘1984.’
There’s a fantastic channel on YouTube.
Jennings Motor Sports.
That guy gets engines running which have sat abandoned for decades, sometimes as old as 100 years.
You can’t do that with a BEV after just two years of zero charge-discharge cycles.
LOL
They had electric cars around 100years ago but obviously not as popular as the ICE even then.
Daily Mail – always last with the latest News.
I predict the 2035 ban will become the 2040 ban, become the 2050 ban, etc.
Threatening car manufacturers, gas boiler makers won’t work either. Wherever sufficient demand exists, someone will find a way to supply profitably.
Also of course Party election funds, and grift for politicians means they have to keep on-side with big business.
Couldn’t agree more.
These numpties writing these “rules” have never had to make anything and never suffered directly as a result of their own, utter ineptitude.
They think electricity comes from the wall.
It seems clear that EVs are coming to be seen as a one owner commodity item for the large scale corporate sector. The re-cycling of scrapped EVs is difficult and expensive and the UK can only manage to run a much smaller number of EVs than it can petrol/diesel vehicles.
If they push ahead with this and unless they scrap the Climate Change Act they will have to; then low and middle income groups will increasingly be unable to run a private car. But possibly more insidious is that many small businesses, plumbers, electricians, builders, gardeners etc. may well find it too hard to run a van to operate their business. You will need to be a large corporate group running a fleet of EVs to make it viable. If my prediction is correct? then it will be another nail in the coffin of small businesses, all business will move to being done by large corporate groups capable of running a fleet of EV vehicles.
The globalists hate small businessess even more so the self employed. The government introduce more and more legislation to cripple small business so that corporations move in. Part of the convid scam was to destroy small businessess amongst other more nefarious reasons.
The Great Reset in a nutshell.
That’s corporatocracy for you!
As Neil oliver said. They want to reduce carbon and we are the carbon they want to reduce..
I bought a Toyota Avensis DXD diesel in January. 2.2td it is quick off the mark but the main reason I chose it over a Skoda Octavia diesel was because it has the chain drive belt, that should go at least 200k. Only 93k on it so hope I can get some good service out of it. I never like to miss an oil change and keep the service history fully stamped.
It could be said that the glory of a petrol engine is its inefficency. Consider the obverse of efficeincy, the price you pay when you pursue it. I am glad that momey is rapidly disappearing from investment into electric cars. It is crazy to sit on top of one of those batteries assured by the loving artificial intelligence of the car that its sensors will prevent any accident. This is not so and could never be so and you can find horrific videos that demonstrate this. I look forward to a time in the not too distant future when cars become like 1970s cars again and you can open them up and fix them yourself.
We’re also likely to reach a period when all the recently commissioned wind turbines reach end of life. That should be fun.
The thing is, the gov / new world order want electric cars to have limited mileage / are expensive etc. This is all part of the push to get us out of our cars and reduce our freedom. At the moment, car manufacturers are going along with all this bs because they are raking in new sales at vastly higher prices – a Toyota hybrid now costs over £30,000! The question is: when car sales drop off a cliff, what will they say then? Will they take a pay-off and cease to be, or fight for the future of the motor industry? I’m not sure.
EV’s are the Betamax of the automotive industry
Policies based on ideology rather than common sense or that are market based where people are given choice and often know best how to spend their own money will nearly always fail, unless they happen to get lucky. ——-Near where I live they are installing hydrogen heating into a bunch of houses from people who volunteered to have this instead of gas central heating. They were offered a free boiler etc and were told this was the future etc etc. One person in the chosen area which is in Buckhaven in Fife refused to have the Hydrogen because he did his own research into it and came to the conclusion that the long term cost would be excessive. he discovered that Hydrogen isn’t actually a fuel and it has to be manufactured which is an expensive process He decided it would not be good value for money at all. This is what the free market enables people to do. The trouble with all of the Green technologies is that we are mostly coerced into using them, and as we increasingly see with these technologies from our rising energy bills that they are not good value for money, and infact in many cases they do not even save the environment at all. The rare earth minerals and rare earth stuff that has to be mined for batteries is not very GREEN.
The mid term prospects for car ownership across society are not good because of this. Those who can’t afford new or nearly new are going to have supply issues in a few years, especially when initiatives like ULEZ takes a large number of perfectly serviceable cars out of the game as well.