The rest of the car almost certainly doesn't have 200,000 more miles in it, so who cares?
People replace vehicles because they want and can afford replacement ones, not because they are mileage limited.
That isn't quite true. It is often because it is uneconomical to keep.
The issue with many older vehicles is that it just starts costing more to repair it than the car is worth. You are constantly putting in good money, after bad and the the costs keep going up over time. At that point it is often better to buy another vehicle.
I could have kept my 2007 Vauxhall Astra going for another 100,000 miles. The issue is that the car was worth £600-1000. Each repair was costing upwards of £300.
I could buy another second hand Vauxhall Astra with the amount of money I was spending on the car yearly. It just wasn't worth it.
However that frequently isn't the case with car. It is £300-1000 every time I need to get it repaired. This happens at an increasing frequency as the car ages. This can then add up to several 1000s quite easily.
e.g In the last year I owned that Astra I had to to fix the following issue (all costs include labour):
- New Clutch (and it needed to be towed to the garage as the clutch wouldn't engage). £1000 for clutch replacement, £150 for the tow. I also needed to rent a car to drive to a funeral. That cost me another £100-200 IIRC. So we we are up to £1350.
- Car would randomly go into Limp mode. New sensor cost £300. Vehicle was never really fixed. It just went into Limp mode much less, so there was another problem somewhere. Which would need another trip to the garage.
- Service. This flagged several issues with the car. All these small repairs was another £800.
I am already upto £2,450 and I know I've forgotten stuff. I bought the car for £4000 originally.
If it was something like a classic barn on wheels Volvo which are bullet proof, or a classic Rover like a Rover P5. I might be willing to keep dumping money into it. But it isn't, it is a Vauxhall Astra.
Then other things like hoses, anything rubber will perish and will be replaced. Everything starts going at some point and the cost mount up quick!
I'm guessing it was a Lexus?
I keep a small toolbox in my vehicle. It's mostly inexpensive hand tools, but I include a Milwaukee M18 Fuel impact and a set of sockets for it - super handy for changing tires.
In my 25 years of driving, I've broken down probably a dozen times total. Of those, only twice have I required a tow - and one of those was in my wife's Kia Sorento, which we bought new.
Easily 90% of the usage of the tools I carry ends up being on other people's vehicles. I can swap a wheel on the side of the road in <10m with a bottle jack and a battery-powered impact, with no real manual labor involved.
Other breakdowns I've had in the past were things like the serpentine belt breaking or a coolant hose coming loose. Those are five minute fixes if you have access to a parts store. When the belt snapped on my Jeep in the middle of the night on a trip a few years ago, I used an pair of my wife's leggings that she had packed to get us home. I just tied them by hand, bypassed all the non-essential stuff on the motor, and drove the ~50 miles back home to deal with it the next day.
I service my own vehicles and do a lot of preventative maintenance and inspect the condition of my vehicles regularly, it's become a hobby since I enjoy working on them. I adhere to a strict schedule of maintenance and inspection. Just flushing and filling fluids (Brake System, Transmission, Power steering, Rear Differential, Coolant and Oil) can greatly extend the life of the power train. I have never had a break down where I needed to call a tow truck, Each vehicle has a small jump pack in the trunk, alternators, batteries can be tested for signs of degradation, why wait until they fail, replacing worn parts before they cause further damage. I always try to rebuild the OEM part since it is of higher quality then the replacements, like an alternator or starter. If I do need to get a replacement, Rockauto carries many OEM parts. I just replaced the original water pump on the Avalon, it had 160k miles on it. The 4Runner has approx 350k miles on it and many of the parts (alternator, starter, etc are original.
This what I find curious. It used to be cars were largely limited by their main driveline components. Now those components have been simplified. In a lot of the BYD cars it is literally the exact same driveline so for them it is almost commoditised.
My part of the world sees no snow or salt. So if the body is fine and the driveline is fine....
Why can't I run a car for a million miles and simply replace coils, struts, hubs, bearings, carpets, seats, the-tiny-electric-motors-that-drive-windows-and-seats-and-mirrors etc?
IE where is the electric version of the old landcruiser series?
The non reliable stuff is all the OTHER wiring/screen/software.
The paper that underpins the 80% claim is paywalled and I'm cheap so don't have the numbers to hand. But in the abstract sense being statistical could go the other way too - i.e. some might get to 90% before they start their exponential decay.
> And "exponential degrade" doesn't mean it's particularly fast.
True, exponential doesn't mean much other than e^n where it's implied that n > 1. However the value of n does matter, for example a decay rate for n=100 is quite different than n=1.1. Again, we're talking in general terms as I don't have the value of n for this. For better or worse, I'm taking the paper at face value when it talks of end of life at 80% - however it has been peer reviewed and is in a "proper" journal so to my mind that adds some credibility.
It's worth mentioning that the current DoE guidance on lifetimes is: "12 to 15 years in moderate climates (8 to 12 years in extreme climates)". Of course that guidance is also based on a statistical analysis that doesn't seem to account for modern battery management systems [1]. There are additional factors at play that govern battery degradation, including things like: battery chemistry, environment, EV charging habits, etc.
Ultimately the real test of EV battery life will come with time. It'll manifest as the change in average age of scrapped vehicles with large fleets of EV's on the road. In Norway right now it's about 18 years (for a mostly internal combustion fleet) [2]. However as of this year all private vehicles sold must be zero-emission - so in 10-20 years we'll have some interesting data [3].
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250530000446/https://afdc.ener...
[2]: https://www.ssb.no/en/statbank/table/05522/tableViewLayout1/...
[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250530115356/https://www.regje...
The publication cites sources from 15 years ago for this "fact" [0]. That's ancient history in the context of EVs (even before the first reliable mass production EV - Tesla's Model S - was initially released). As a practical matter, the article points out that most EV manufacturers (Tesla included) warranty their batteries for at least 70% capacity at timespans near a decade, which would bankrupt them all if EV batteries just up and died at 80%.
0) [35] O. Erdinc, B. Vural, and M. Uzunoglu, ‘‘A dynamic lithium-ion battery model considering the effects of temperature and capacity fading,’’ in Proc. Int. Conf. Clean Electr. Power, Jun. 2009, pp. 383–386.
[36] K. Smith, T. Markel, G.-H. Kim, and A. Pesaran, ‘‘Design of electric drive vehicle batteries for long life and low cost,’’ in Proc. Accelerated Stress Test. Rel. (ASTR), IEE Workshop, 2010, pp. 6–8.
To the practical matter - yes, EV manufacturers are very careful with warranty periods. Anecdotally, an acquaintance had a Tesla for 8 years. 6 months after the 8-year battery warranty expired the battery ceased working. The details were a little unclear (it was explained in broken English/Norwegian). That said, anecdata carries little weight. What we need is more peer-reviewed research to update our understanding of battery longevity. Until we have that we need to rely on the existing published knowledge... otherwise anyone can assert anything and we learn nothing.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250530000446/https://afdc.ener...
In other words, if a battery is new and has 200 miles range, but is driven 100 miles a day, it will stay between 20-80% charge each day when charging.
but at 80% capacity, 160 miles range, it must be either charged above 80% or discharged below 20% each day which is unhealthy for the battery. (either 80%->17% or 83%->20%)
as soon as it starts getting out of healthy range I can see how it can degrade faster.
But cars that stay in that range will have a much longer lifespan.
I think modern EVs are set up to charge to a certain percentage of capacity rather than a specific range, kind of like how smartphones do it.
Your point about depth of discharge ( 80%->17% ) makes sense though, since the battery system can't really control someone's driving routine.
I looked into the secondhand EV market (in Norway). In doing so I read quite a bit of academic research to figure out the lifetime of an EV. Apparently the 80% capacity is the accepted end of life for an EV battery:
"For batteries, 80% of the initial capacity is referred to as the point after which it tends to exhibit an exponential decay of capacity and is considered an unreliable power source after this point for EV application" [1]
So, the Tesla the article talks about won't be much good, or at least not for very long.
[1]: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3271287