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by anovikov 3265 days ago
Tesla's existing batteries are expected to be more or less good for 500,000 miles, some already made it to 190,000 miles - average lifespan of a car - with under 10% degradation. 200K miles - easily, nearly every battery will do that with at worst 20% degradation. No, almost no car will ever need a battery replacement unless battery was bricked by gross mishandling (equivalent of fueling a gasoline car with diesel or something like that).

https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/tesla-battery-degradation/

2 comments

> No, almost no car will ever need a battery replacement unless battery was bricked by gross mishandling

How would that be possible? Charge and discharge cycles are closely monitored and controlled by computers.

A real Soviet hero, with good training and some vodka, can do almost everything comrade... No fool proof is a real proof, people manage to break all kind of things. But, that is not a wear and tear - it is about as easy to brick a new battery as a 10 year old one.
My 2015 LEAF has about 10% degradation in under 11K miles. I doubt Tesla is 20x better.
It looks like the 2015 Leaf has a 24 kWh battery. The current entry-level Model S has a 75 kWh battery and it can have up to a 100 kWh battery.

That matters because battery capacity fade increases non-linearly with depth of cycling. If both a Leaf owner and a Model S owner drive 40 miles per day, I'd expect the Leaf battery capacity to fade more than 3x as fast as the Model S capacity, because of the deeper battery cycling. That's true even of the Model S 60/60D that had a 75 kWh battery software-locked to 60 kWh of usable capacity. The capacity fade is linked to the physical characteristics of the battery; the software unlock to a full 75 kWh just bought the option to discharge the battery more deeply for longer uninterrupted driving.

> It looks like the 2015 Leaf has a 24 kWh battery. The current entry-level Model S has a 75 kWh battery and it can have up to a 100 kWh battery.

So, a net price of about $1K/kWh of battery seems to be the going rate.

Correct. And when the Roadster was released, it was the price of just the battery.