Isn't the environment for a car's battery more hostile than that for a phone? More extremes of heat and cold, constant vibration in use and the peppering off the underside of a car with stones - which is partly why there is more protection, both software-wise, physical and thermal? Perhaps not quite enough if tales of cars being written off because of minor scrapes and dents to the battery are true.[XAP]Bob wrote: ↑8 Dec 2024, 10:38pm So you assume that a high value battery will be subject to the same abuse as an old phone battery and won’t have any sort of protection built in?
Battery life does degrade, but by a tiny margin. There are battery packs out there that have done hundreds of thousands of miles - way more than a typical car will ever do.
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BEV batteries are worth protecting, and that’s what manufacturers do. There is plenty of monitoring, balancing, charge rate control, thermal management which goes into keeping batteries alive for longer than petrol engines could hope to manage without regular serving and replacement parts.
My own experience of Li-ion battery life down the years is that after an initial short plateau from new, capacity remains robust over several hundred cycles (providing a battery isn't left charged or discharged, or otherwise abused) before at around 80% capacity, the performance tends to fall off a lot more quickly. If you try to use it as usual, this can lead to even more rapid deterioration.
There appears to be the odd battery which seems to last well beyond the average without any special care - is this simply variations in production? With phones, tablets and some laptops the cost of replacement is sufficiently low it's not a big deal, with a motor car a few £thousand very much is. But will car batteries become ever more expensive to replace if necessary, as those for phones etc have?
With an engine one can hear, feel and see wear when buying and there's the ability to service to suit operating conditions. If you were prepared to reject the herd instinct and not buy something BMC, Ford or Vauxhall, there were cars from the 1950s onwards whose engines would last 400,000 miles without anything more than basic servicing. In contrast, a battery simply sits there, slowly degrading as time passes whether used or not, needing computer interrogation in detail to begin to understand its condition - is this offered as part of the car's description when on sale? Going by how many bars exist on a dash display could be seen as winging it when so much money's at stake.
